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THE LIFE THAT NOW IS: 



SERMONS 



BY 



EOBERT COLLYER, 

AUTHOR OF * NATURE AND LIFE." 




BOSTON: 

HORACE IB. FULLER, 

14 Bromfield Street. 

1871. 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, 
By HORACE B. FULLER, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



Stereotyped at the Boston Stereotype Foundry, 
No. 19 Spring Lane. 



TO 

WILLIAM HENRY FURNESS, 

WHOSE LIFE IS HID WITH CHRIST 
IN GOD, 

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK. 



PREFACE. 



The name I have given to this little volume, 
is also the best preface. It is a selection of such 
sermons as I have been able to preach about the 
life that now is. If I thought that any apology 
was needed for saying so little about that which 
is to come, I would make this twofold plea : First, 
that so many better and wiser men have said so 
much about it already ; and, second, I am so sure 
that if we can but find the right way through 
this world, and walk in it, the doors of Heaven 
are as sure to open to us as ours open to our 
own children when they come eagerly home from 
school. 

R. C. 

Chicago, May 9, 1871. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Vines and Branches 1 

II. The Thorn in the Flesh 23 

III. Evert Man a Penny. . . 49 

IV. The Two Harvests 67 

V. How Enoch walked with God 88 

VI. Holiness of Helpfulness Ill 

VII. Gashmu 137 

VIII. Storming Heaven 161 

IX. Why Herod feared John 186 

X. Marriage 206 

XI. Children and Childhood 228 

XII. Tender, Trusty, and True 251 

XIII. Patience 265 

XIV. The Two Mites 284 

XV. Old Age 303 

XVI. At the Soldiers' Graves ' . 325 



7 

# 



SERMONS. 



I. 

VINES AND BRANCHES. 

John xv. 5: "I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that 
abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth mucn 
fruit : for without me ye can do nothing." 

It is entirely probable that these words were 
spoken in the spring-time, when the vines on 
the slopes and terraces about Jerusalem were 
opening into leaf and blossom, and when this 
analogy would have all the power and beauty 
that could come from the object as well as the 
subject. There, right before them, and all about 
them, are the vines, standing in the sun. Some 
of the branches are the genuine outgrowth of 
the vine itself. Others are only there by graft- 
ing. Some are strong, some feeble, and some 
dead; and the dead, as Jesus is speaking, the 
1 1 



2 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



vine-dressers are cutting away, that they may 
not interfere with the living vines or disfigure the 
vineyards. But, strong, or feeble, or dead, there 
stand the stems, ready to pour their sap into 
every branch alike, or, if they make any differ- 
ence, to give their life to the lowliest first and 
in the fullest measure, that they which have the 
less sun may have the more sap, and more at 
least of life, if they have less of what makes life 
a blessing. So Jesus said, "I am the vine, ye 
are the branches, and my Father is the husband- 
man; and every branch in me that beareth not 
fruit he taketh away ; and every branch that 
beareth fruit he pruneth it, that it may bear 
more fruit. Abide in me, and I in you; for as 
the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it 
abide in the vine, no more can ye, except ye 
abide in me." 

In this sermon I want to try to find this sub- 
ject through the object, to see how the analogy is 
true, first naturally, second spiritually, and third 
universally ; how it will hold good while vines 
and men continue to grow on the earth. It is 
not something once done, and then done with, 
but something that is now doing, and that will 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 3 

he done to the end of time. In many great, 
true ways, living stems are still standing in the 
sun, with their branches strong, or feeble, or 
dead, about them ; and the dead are still cut 
away, and the living pruned by the husband- 
man, watching and working forever in this 
vineyard and among the vines which he has 
planted. 

This truth of the vines and the branches is to 
be understood, first of all, in a natural sense ; and 
we are to set aside, when we look at it in this 
sense, what we are fond of calling mystery, but 
ought rather to call obscurity, and to understand 
that Jesus meant, first, by what he said then, that 
these men, sitting or standing about him that day, 
were to be as intimately united to him through 
their spirits as the branches are united to the 
vine — were to draw their highest life through 
him from God, as these branches drew their sap 
through the stem from the earth, and were to 
drink in the sun and make the stem glorious 
by their fruitfalness, as did these branches on 
the vine ; or, to demonstrate their deadness, in 
contrast with those that did drink in the sun 
and bear great clusters, and so fail to be what 



4 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



they might be, not because the sap refused to 
run and the sun to shine, but because they did 
not turn sap and sun to good account by bring- 
ing forth good fruit. 

So that the power by which Jesus first drew 
Peter and John to his side, and held them there, 
was a personal and perfectly' natural power; and 
we are not to think of it as a mystery, except as 
the influence of one life and soul over another for 
good or evil is always a mystery. Attracted to 
him, this one from his tax-gathering, and that one 
from his fishing, they had gradually felt the influ- 
ence of his spirit running through their whole life ; 
were never quite what they ought to be when he 
did not inspire them ; they had no such power to 
live by as that which in some way they felt flow- 
ing out of his nature into theirs ; and so they came 
in the end to see what he meant when he said, 
" Without me ye can do nothing." If you take a 
cutting from a feeble stalk, and graft it on a vig- 
orous stem, the books say the result will be that 
the graft will show a far greater vigor than it 
could have shown ungrafted ; will reveal in fruit 
or flower, very clearly, the new stock from which 
it draws its vitality. It was so with these men. 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



5 



They felt their life grow strong and good in the 
strength and goodness of their great Friend, 
and they were to feel it forever, more intensely 
as the years went on ; then they were to send 
out and take in new branches in their turn ; and 
so the true vine is at last to cover the whole 
earth. But whether in the world of the apostles, 
or in the world here and now ; in the way Jesus 
saved Peter, or in the way you are to save the 
blasphemer, who loves you and is influenced by 
you as he is by no other man, it is always the 
lesser growing better by the greater ; the weaker 
being grafted into, and drawing life from, the 
stronger ; the Son of Man forever saved, and sanc- 
tified, and fitted for heaven by the Son of God. 

So it is well worth our notice* that this is" in a 
great general sense, a prime principle in life ; and 
that, whatever we may say about our individual 
freedom, the great majority of us are only free 
as the branch on the vine is free ; away back we 
join into some other personal life for our sal- 
vation, and draw from it, as the branch from the 
stem, our most essential vitality and power — 
that in a body or in a book, which is the spirit- 
ual body of the inspired thinker, some soul, 



6 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



larger and stronger than our own, has got hold 
of us, and is pouring into us its life, and mould- 
ing us this very day. 

When Carlyle gave his address in Edinburgh, 
some years ago, the great hall was filled, not 
with Scotchmen alone, but with men who poured 
in from the most distant parts of England and 
Europe to sit at his feet and drink in his words, 
because he is to them the vine, and they are the 
branches. When Mr. Emerson comes to our city, 
there are those sitting about his feet that will 
hardly listen to any other living man, because 
he is to them the vine, and they are the branches*. 
When the gracious and good English queen was 
left a widow, she found that her life was so in- 
terwoven with the life she had lost from her side, 
as to bring an abandonment of sorrow such as the 
world has seldom witnessed, so sad it was and 
heavy ; because, though she was queen and he 
was consort, he was the vine and she was the 
branch. So Elijah was the vine to Elisha, and 
David to Jonathan, and Paul to Timothy, and 
Socrates to Plato ; and the world is full of those 
vines and branches, because it is a natural law 
of our life. I meet every day men and women 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



7 



who feel that without Charming, or Parker, or 
Swedenborg, or Wesley, they can do nothing. 
The great soul has taken them in 2 and imparted 
its life to theirs. You may see, sometimes, a 
young man who will do no good at all until 
he gets a wife ; but then he does really be- 
come a man. Now, such a man may scoff at 
the woman question, as such men sometimes 
do, and say the common platitudes about the 
inferiority of the woman's nature to that of 
the man, as such men often will ; but a woman 
like that is replying, in her silent, steady 
life, all day long, "I am the vine, you are the 
branch, and without me you can do nothing." 
" I consider," says Dr. Arnold, " beyond all 
wealth, honor, or even health, is the attachment 
we form to noble souls ; because to become 
one with the good, generous, and true, is to 
be, in a measure, good, generous, and true 
yourself." 

Now it follows, of course, that this which is 
at once so natural and universal, must be so far 
right ; because all wrong is unnatural, and, as I 
am compelled to believe, exceptional. But then 
it brings up this question: What life, in a body 



8 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



or a booK, m earth or in heaven, is the one that 
can make the most of me, can do most for me, 
and inspire me to do most for mankind? Can 
Webster and Hamilton, in political ideas ? In 
commercial morality, can the Lawrences and 
Hoveys ? Can Channing, Parker, or Sweden- 
borg be supreme to me among men in faith, 
or Emerson in nature, or Tennyson in a far- 
reaching and delicate intuition? Let me never 
be suspected of a want of reverence for a noble 
gift, for a sweet mastery for good, from whatever 
source it may come. William Furness, writing 
me once about the distinction made in a new Life 
of Jesus between the human and divine in his 
nature, said, " I regret the distinction, because 
Jesus is the most human being that ever lived, 
and therefore the most divine. His divinity lay 
in his pure humanity." It is what I think of in 
this personal relation of the vine and branches in 
the person of Jesus Christ. I have no need to 
go into mystery, except I say the mystery that 
must always dwell in the way one soul inspires 
another and Jives in it. I am simply to realize 
that if I can become united to Jesus Christ, as 
the branch is united to the vine, then I become a 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



9 



part of a life, before which Webster and Hamilton 
pale in their grasp of the principles we have em- 
bodied in our Declaration of Independence ; who 
was deeper in the doctrine of the fatherhood than 
Channing, and understood free grace in a way to 
make Wesley a dreamer ; and before whom princes 
of commercial morality stand with bared heads as 
they see the great guiding lines of the Sermon 
on the Mount. 

" One who, because he overcomes us so 
Because he is most noble, and a king, 
Can well prevail against our fears, and fling 
His purple round us, till our hearts do grow 
So close against his heart as not to know 
How weak they are alone." 

This brings me, secondly, to the true" test of this 
union with Christ, what it is, and how it is to be 
distinguished, or, in other words, the spiritual 
truth of the analogy. 

And I need not take much time telling you, to 
begin with, that it is a very common thing for 
every great branch on this Christian stem to 
claim to be the true branch of the true vine. 
The Romanist bases this claim apparently on 
being the oldest branch, and the Rationalist on 
being the newest; the Baptist on being the 



10 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



branch nearest the water, the Quaker on being 
so far away; the Universalist, because it gets 
so much sunlight, and the Calvinist, seemingly, 
because it gets so little ; the Episcopalian, be- 
cause every twig on it's particular branch is 
trained and confirmed in a particular way, and 
the Unitarian, because each, of its sprays is left 
very much to its natural instinct to grow as it 
will. And all these claims, as you know, have 
involved the Christian world in endless, and 
sometimes shameful, persecutions. Now, will not 
this analogy of the vine and the branches cast 
precisely the light we need across the spiritual 
claims of the church and the man, and light up 
the whole question of what it is to share in this 
intimate life of Christ in a way that is never to be 
mistaken ? Suppose the branches on a vine could 
make this claim that is made by the churches — 
that one could cry, " Believe in me, for I am the 
oldest branch ; " and another, " In me, for I am 
the newest ; " and this, " In me, for I am most in 
the sun ; " what would be the natural and inevita- 
ble reply ? There is but one, it is this : you are 
all alike in being branches on the one stem. But 
you are not united in this way merely to be most in 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



11 



the water or the sun ; it is not a prime question, 
whether you are the oldest or the newest branch ; 
the sole thing to know is, what fruit do you 
bear, and how does that fruit compare with what 
the other branches are bearing ? If this branch 
out in the sun, or this that rejoices in its freedom, 
shall bear only a few dried-up specimens, while 
that near the water, or that away back in the 
shadow, is burdened to breaking, and that tied 
fast to ecclesiastical trellis-work wholly covers 
the trellises with its great ripe clusters, then 
the fruit-bearers are the true branches. If 
Calvinism can fill a man with love, joy, peace, 
long-suffering, gentleness, patience, and good- 
ness ; if it can send him out to clothe the naked, 
feed the hungry, visit the sick, pity the pris- 
oner, and to break every yoke, w T hile my faith, 
or any - other, can only inspire me to tell hand- 
somely and eloquently how it is done, but then to 
leave the real thing undone ; to bring out beauti- 
ful blossoms that will fill a whole valley with 
perfume, but to let the blossom suffice and bear 
no fruit, the world does not hold a more empty 
boast than mine of being the true branch of the 
true vine. 



12 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



But now let us put this just the other way. 
Suppose a man, making not the least pretension 
to any intimate union with this vine, one who 
says, " I know nothing about your claim, that 
before I can be what I ought to be I must be 
called, after some special dogma, and in some 
way realize what you hold to be so essential 
to a fruitful life, — but there is my life itself." 
And suppose you should see that such a man really 
does live well ; that his life is good, his soul's large 
windows free from blemish ; that -he is loving, 
long-suffering, gentle, patient, and good ; that the 
wan face of sickness lights up in his presence, 
and he is feet to the lame, and a father to the 
poor, and breaks the bond of oppression, and 
causes the widows to sing for joy ; what would 
you say to a man like that ? You would say, " My 
friend, when Jesus was here among men, he said, 
1 other sheep I have, that are not of this fold.' " 
Now, it is no matter to me that you disclaim this 
personal union ; you hold it all the same. You 
are one of the branches of the true vine, because 
you bear good fruit. It would really make no 
deep and abiding difference if you should say 
you do not believe in Christ. Christ believes in 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



13 



you, and has gone to prepare a place for you, and 
will come again, and take you to himself. For a 
real belief is not some mere opinion, this way or 
that, in the mind. It is the whole set and pur- 
pose of the life and soul; so you can say, "I 
never taught in the streets in thy name ; " but he 
will say, " You taught the freedman, or sent a 
teacher to do it." You can deny that you ever 
cast out devils ; but he will say, " Don't you 
remember that man you picked up out of the 
gutter, and how you held on to him until he sat 
clothed and in his right mind ? Ye did it unto 
the least of mine ; ye did it to me." 

But then it would be a very great mistake to 
claim that a man, living such a life, and dis- 
claiming Christian ideas and convictions for what 
he was, and what he was doing, was, therefore, 
an independent vine of himself ; owed nothing to 
the sap that flows forever from that inexhaustible 
stock in these Christian lands, and was the growth 
of a plant whose seed was altogether in itself. It 
is indeed seldom that this is so. 

When a man lives a noble life, thinks great 
thoughts, does great things, shames Christian 
men by the intrinsic beauty and grace of his life, 



14 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



and yet disclaims connection with the Christian 
stock, I want to know how he has come into life ; 
and, if he is the son of an unbroken succession of 
Christian, ministers and men running directly 
through many generations, I say, then, that goes 
a long way to account for it. You are not a 
graft, but a natural branch of the great vine. It 
is true that you are able to live isolated from the 
special Christian line in the world to-day, but it is 
very doubtful indeed whether you could have done 
so well if' your fathers had not lived in the Chris- 
tian church of yesterday. And if a man in my 
city says to me, " I do not care for churches and 
worship ; I can worship at home ; " and then goes 
on to tell me how his good old father, the deacon, 
used to go to church in New England, I feel 
like saying, a My friend, your father, the deacon, I 
suppose, left you very little money, but he left you 
a grand legacy of thought and feeling, that reach- 
es up to heaven, and belongs there. The truth is, 
you are a birthright member of the Christian 
church. Away back you reach into the true vine. 
Now you have made your little legacy of money 
into a fortune, and may the Lord make you the hap- 
pier for every dollar you are worth. But tell me 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



15 



now, how is it about that other legacy ? Are you 
merely using up the interest of that, or are you 
clipping into the principal ? Is the way you are 
living likely to end in your children's having such 
a treasure of the thought and feeling that ennoble 
the soul as you had, or, in giving them more 
money, will you give them less grace? Nay, 
man, make it a personal matter. Tell me what 
your home worship is doing for the world's salva- 
tion, what good fruit comes from it, and then I 
will tell you exactly what it is worth. For, if it 
bring the good fruits of the spirit and life that 
always come of any genuine worship of God 
whatever, your, course is the next best to that of 
plunging heart and soul into some real Christian 
church and movement, such as would best answer 
to your longing and the world's welfare. But if 
in your isolation you bear no such fruit, and are 
aware of an ever-slackening endeavor to do 
anything noble and good, then, I do not doubt 
that you are still a branch of the great vine ; but 
every branch that beareth not fruit, He taketh 
away." 

But with these illustrations of what a far-reach- 
ing influence this of Christ is to us all, and in 



16 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



the most direct way, and what a strict account it 
holds with every branch on the stem, I say 
fearlessly, that this one test is the true test, 
and there is no other of union with Christ, or 
how I may know and prove it. I bear fruit, or I 
do not bear fruit ; it is good, or it is not good. 
When that one thing is made clear, the problem 
is solved so far as I am concerned. Wherever 
you find a man bearing good fruit, there, whether 
he may know it or not, in a direct personal way, 
you find a man united to Jesus Christ, — a true 
branch of the true vine. I care not what you 
call him. 

And so it is once more, that just as on the 
vine there is a vast complicated, yet perfect 
inter-action of one branch on another, as no one 
branch can possibly exist for itself, but draws in 
the sunlight to send it down and through the 
whole vine, sharing what it has got with the 
others, and sharing what they have got, giving 
them strength, and getting strength from them ; 
a separate branch in every way, and yet in every 
way a part of the whole vine, so all these great 
churches, interests, and influences we call Chris- 
tian, and know to be such, blend beautifully 



. VINES AND BRANCHES. 17 

under all their differences and make the perfect 
whole. It is like what I experienced in Paris . 
once. I wanted to hear Coquerel, the great 
French preacher, or at least to see his face, so I 
went with a brother preacher to his church.. 
We found he was not to be there, and it was 
not church time. But groping along a dark 
passage in the basement of the building in the 
direction of some sounds, we came at last to a 
door, which opened right into a Sunday school, 
of at least four hundred children. We sat down 
quietly during the lesson. I did not understand 
a word they said. When it was over, they pre- 
pared to sing. The superintendent gave the hymn. 
I was still in the dark, until all at once the whole 
school burst out into one of the most familiar melo- 
dies we use in our own Sunday school, one I had 
heard in_Unity Church a hundred times, and then I 
seemed to understand all about it. It was like that 
old Pentecost, long ago, when the Spirit came 
down, and every man heard the disciples talking in 
his own tongue. So we say our own words in our 
own tongue, and are very careful not to get 
mixed up with others that are saying other words 
in other tongues, and we hardly understand each 
2 



18 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



other at all. But some day we find a strange 
congregation at their worship or their work, and 
though we do not know the words, when they 
strike the same great chord we are instantly in 
the whole spirit of the thing, and feel quite at 
home to the music. It is like the Portuguese 
Hymn, that is just as good, and gracious, and 
sweet when it rings in a prayer-meeting, as when 
it goes swelling and sounding through the grand 
mass. It is like the hymn-books we use in our 
worship, written by old saints of the Primitive 
Church, and saints in the church of to-day ; 
by men and women, those whose hearts were 
breaking for sorrow, and those whose hearts could 
hardly hold their own for joy ; by men as wide 
apart as St. Gregory and George Dawson of 
Birmingham. 

"But they are all made one in Christ, 

And love each other tenderly, 
The old, the young, the rich, the poor 

In that great company. 
And there shall come a glorious day, 

When all the good saints, every one 
Shall meet within their Father's home, 

And stand before his throne." 



And then again, as in the vine the stem makes 
the branches strong with its strength, fills them 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



19 



with life out of its heart and supplies the sap, 
the one prime condition of their fruitfulness ; 
and they, in their turn, cover not themselves alone, 
but the stem also with glory, in the great ripe 
clusters they bear for the harvest ; so in this 
true vine, the spirit of Christ, out of which the 
life of the world comes pouring in a never-ceasing 
stream, the branches can cover the stem itself 
with glory and praise. 

In Manchester, right in the heart of the vast 
modern city, you find a place two hundred years 
old, as quiet and still as if there were not a factory 
within a hundred miles. It includes a noble 
library of books, to which the whole world has 
free access, and a foundation in which a great 
number of boys are educated and fitted for life. 
More than two hundred years ago Humphrey 
Chetham died in Manchester; he was a rich man, 
and left his riches to found this college and 
library ; and there, from that time to this, 
through all the changes of time in England, 
forty or more poor boys have been housed and 
fed, educated and fitted out for life, and that great 
library of books has been as free as ihe air to all 
who wanted to read them. Now think what glory 



20 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



and praise have come in those centuries to that 
good name in the good this legacy to Manchester 
has done ; how all the world over, men have 
lived well and wisely, who could say) " I was 
one of the college boys in Manchester, and had 
free access to that library, and its nurture and 
protection made me a man, when I might have 
been a mere waif and weed in the great highway 
of the world ! " It touches my final idea of this 
great, true vine, that Jesus, who once entered into 
the heavens, left to the world this legacy, by 
which he is and is to be more intensely and glori- 
ously present in his risen life than he was when 
Peter and John sat by his side in Galilee, as Hum- 
phrey Chetham is more intensely and gloriously 
in Manchester, now two hundred and thirteen 
years after his death, than ever he was in his life. 

0, friends, we read these new Lives of Christ 
that are pouring from the press ! We are fasci- 
nated by Renan, and bewildered by Strauss. We 
get a glimpse of his presence in Ecce Homo, 
touch the hem of his garments in Schenkel, and 
almost see him as he was in Furness, and think 
how glad we should have been to be near him 
in his very living presence — to be one of the 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



21 



Twelve, and hear his voice, and touch his hand, 
and be healed by his power, and lifted by his 
spirit to God. I tell you this identification is better 
than that intercourse — to be one with this great 
vine, as it now lives on this earth; to be one 
of the branches that draw their life from that 
vine, that catch the sunlight and rain, grow 
gloriously towards the heavens, ripen great 
clusters of fruit, and make the stem glorious 
in their glory, — this is to know Christ. We 
cannot read the life of Christ so as to understand 
it, until we enter into its spirit, any more than 
J efferson Davis can understand the life of Abra- 
ham Lincoln. Loyalty to Christ's spirit and work 
is the best commentary, and the only one that can 
make Christ altogether clear to us. Go about 
the Father's business as he did. Send his Gospel 
far and wide ; be ye saviours in your degree ; 
take Christ into your hearts, and then there will 
be very little trouble about him in your minds. 
But then never forget that if he is the vine, 
God is the sun. 

There is an awful and unspeakable distinction 
between the two natures. They can never be the 
same. He is the true vine, and the whole church 



22 



VINES AND BRANCHES. 



— all true, fruitful souls — are the branches. Yet 
as vine and branch alike would be nothing without 
the rain and sun, so even this most blessed life of 
Christ in the soul would be nothing without God, 
his Father and our Father — God over all, blessed 
forevermore ! 



II. 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 

2 Corinthians xii. 7-9 : " And lest I should be exalted 
above measure through the abundance of the revelations, 
there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger 
of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above 
measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it 
might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is 
sufficient for thee : for my strength is made perfect in 
weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my 
infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me." 

What is known in sacred biography as Paul's 
thorn in the flesh, has been a thorn in the pulpit 
expositions of all the Christian ages. Carefully 
concealing its nature himself, he has thereby set 
all that want to be wise above what is written, 
in a state of uneasiness to find it out. The re- 
sult, as might be expected, has been very curi- 
ous and quite inconclusive. One commentator is 
clear it was a defect of the eyes ; another is cer- 
tain it was a defect in the speech ; and lameness 
has been supposed, and neuralgia, and a want of 

23 



24 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



that dignity of appearance that is supposed to be 
indispensable to a successful minister ; and so al- 
most endlessly, as different men have been led 
by different fancies, to this or that conclusion. 

So I suppose it cannot be of much use to 
us to know exactly what this thorn was, since the 
man who suffered from it did not care to tell us. 
He certainly cannot have meant to put preachers 
into the perplexity that has come of his conceal- 
ment. He may have felt it was too delicate a 
thing to be made a matter of common talk, even 
to the brethren, as most persons do who are in 
Paul's case. Be that as it may, he felt it was 
right to say that the thorn was there, and he 
could not get rid of it ; could not pray it out, or 
cry it out, or believe it out, or tear it out, or get 
the Lord to take it out. There the thorn was, 
whatever it was, and there it would stay, very 
likely, to the end of this mortal life. But then 
he found in the struggle to be free from the 
thorn, what in the end was better than any such 
freedom, — power and patience to bear his pain ; 
still the power was not his own, nor the patience, 
only the thorn. But this was the end of it : the 
two things together carried him right to God, 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



25 



and laid him to rest in the arms of the Eter- 
nal. And as a sick child rests in the arms of 
its mother, unable to shake off the pain, but still 
wonderfully supported and comforted out of her 
love, so it was in his suffering, when God said, 
" My strength is made perfect in thy weakness." 

Yet with all this hiding, ther% is one thing of 
the deepest possible moment, and that is, the rea- 
son why this thorn should be there. This the 
apostle cannot leave in the dark. He clearly feels 
that we ought all to know why the thorn came. 
It happened to him once, he says, to be just as 
happy as a man can be. It seems still, after 
fourteen years, that he was in heaven, whether 
in the body, or out of the body, he cannot tell. 
All he knows is, that these were the most exalted 
moments of his life ; there he heard things he 
cannot -report, because human language would 
fail to convey the idea if he were free to tell it ,* 
and right in the heart of that experience he got 
his thorn ; it came then ; it was there still ; and 
the reason why it came is clear to him also. He 
was in danger of losing his balance, of being 
carried quite away by his felicity) and so losing 
the sense of his kinship to our pained and suffer- 



26 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



ing humanity and his reliance upon Heaven, so 
there was given him a thorn in the flesh. And 
so it is when we know this much about the 
thorn, we can see that we do not need to know any 
more. The particular fact in the life of one man, 
opens thereby into an experience that is in some 
measure common to all. If we could know that 
Paul's thorn in the flesh was a defect in his eyes, 
or his speech, or a pain in his head, or the want 
of a foot to his stature, that particular thorn would 
fasten us down to a particular experience, and 
we should lose the great general lesson which I 
want to find, if I can, to-day, in speaking to you. 

First, of the thorn in the flesh of our common 
humanity. 

Second, what we can ourselves do about it. 
And, 

Third, what can come to us with any thorn, if 
we can find out Paul's way of dealing with it. 

And first, is it not true in a great general sense, 
that we all have some time a thorn in the flesh. 
Something that we do not care to describe by 
particulars, any more than Paul did, and would 
never mention without grave reason, but there 
it is, as sure as we live, and as long as we 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



27 



live, touching us to the quick with its pain now 
and then, and never letting us go quite so free 
as we were before it first began to stab us. 

In the ranges of our common human history, we 
cannot fail to see the presence of this thorn in the 
greatest and noblest lives. Sometimes it is one 
thing, sometimes another. Now on the surface, 
and now in the nature. Those that soar highest, 
as Paul soared when he saw heaven, bear it with 
them, or bring it back, and carry it, as we do, 
wherever they go. It may be a mean thing, like 
Byron's club-foot ; it shall torment me for all that, 
as if there is no greater misfortune possible to 
man than to go halting all his days ; or it may 
be as great a thing as Dante's worship of Beatrice, 
as he appears in the picture, with that face, sad 
beyond expression, looking up to the beautiful 
saint, whose "soul was like a star, and dwelt 
apart," — it shall be a thorn all the same to each 
man. Or it may be a great vice, like that which 
seized and held Coleridge and De Quincey, and 
put them down in the dungeon of the Giant 
Despair. Or it may be only like the dyspepsia, 
that now, in these days, darkens the whole 
vision of Mr. Carlyle, turning his beautiful after- 



28 



THE THOEN IN THE FLESH. 



noon into a grim and lurid sunset. But it is a 
thorn all the same, to all alike. In king David 
it was a great sin he never could forget if 
he lived to be as old as Methuselah, that stabbed 
him in his sons when penitence and God's grace 
had plucked it out of his soul. In Peter it was 
the memory of that morning, I suppose, when 
he cursed and swore, and turned his back on the 
noblest friend that ever a man had. In Luther 
it was a blackness of darkness that would come 
when it was ready, defying both physicians and 
philosophy, and beating down the soaring soul as 
a great hailstone beats down a bird. In Wesley 
it was a home without love, and a wife insane 
with jealousy, with an old love hidden away 
in his heart that was never permitted to bloom 
in his life, and so on through all the tale. Paul 
has no singularity : we need not be anxious 
about his mystery. Some of these things hurt 
him, and made the poor manhood of him quiver. 
The thorn in the flesh among the great ones of 
the world is a common possession. I said to a 
gentleman once, who told me he had been very 
intimate indeed with a great man, how was it that 
he should have fallen into such evil habits in 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



29 



his later life. "I must not tell you that/' he 
said, "but I may tell you this, that he took to 
wine as a refuge from what to him seemed worse, 
at last, than drinking. It was pitiful it should 
be so, and he should do so ; but knowing him as I 
do, I have always felt that my pity for him iu 
these things should outreach my condemnation." 
It was Paul's delicate and shrouded way of saying 
it is a thorn in the flesh ; but I will not tell you 
what it is. I was talking once again with a 
gentleman who knows very intimately one of our 
greatest living Americans, a man whose name will 
stand high in our history; and speaking especially 
of the felicity of the good providences that have 
attended him, I said he must be one of the hap- 
piest of men. " There is that in his life," my friend 
said, "you do not see, and very few are aware 
of. I knew him a long time before I guessed it : 
it is a pain that he carries about with him like 
his shadow ; not a bodily, but a mental pain, which 
he will carry with him to his grave." 

And so it is with us all — what the thorn is to 
these men in their great estate it may be to us in 
ours. It is true we can all see here and there a 
kindly, easy soul, which seems never to have 



30 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



felt the thorn, one which has certainly never 
soared as Paul had when he caught it, — whose 
temperament will make it hard, one thinks, for 
even Providence to find the nerve. I am not 
sure such a nature may not be thorn proof : I 
think sometimes it is. They say some fishes 
will go on feeding after what seem to be the 
most frightful inflictions, and evidently feel no 
pain. I have thought there might possibly be 
such a temperament as that among men. I re- 
member in one of our Love Feasts in the Meth- 
odist church in England, thirty years ago and 
more, a man got up and told us how he had lost 
his wife by the fever, and then, one by one, 
all his children, and had felt as calm and serene 
through it as if nothing had happened ; not 
suffering in the least ; not feeling a pang of pain ; 
fended and shielded, as he believed, by the Divine 
grace, and up to that moment, when he was talk- 
ing to us, without a grief in his heart. As soon 
as he had done, the wise and manful old preacher 
who was leading the meeting got up, and said, 
" Now, brother, you go home, and into your closet, 
and down on your knees, and never get up again, 
if you can help it, until you are a new man. 



THE THOKN IN THE FLESH. 31 

What you have told us is not a sign of grace, it is 
a sign of the hardest heart I ever encountered in 
a Christian man. Instead of your being a saint, 
you are hardly good enough for a decent sinner. 
Eeligion never takes the humanity out of a man, 
it makes him more human ; and if you were hu- 
man at all, such trouble as you have had, ought 
to have broken your heart. I know it would 
mine, and I pretend to be no more of a saint 
than other people ; so I warn you, never tell such 
a story as that in a Love Feast again." 

That man was an instance of the sort of man who 
may have no thorn in the flesh. The old preacher 
saw it was not in the riches of God's grace, but 
in the poverty of his own nature, that he found 
his impunity from pain ; and such impunity is 
possible to such men always ; yet only as it is 
possible to fishes. But the law of life is to feel 
the thorn : the balance scale of ecstasy is agony. 
Poor Little Boston, in the exquisite story, still 
wanted to be buried in a grave six feet long. I 
never blamed Byron for feeling as he did about 
his foot ; he could no more help that, with his 
, nature, than he could help his lameness. The 
blame lay in his never summoning that strength 



32 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



to the maimed part, by which in his soul he could 
have outsoared the eagle, and outrun the deer, 
— the strength that is made perfect in our weak- 
ness. 

And if I did not know that there is such a 
feeling abiding in some natures like a perpet- 
ual pain, I would not mention this in speaking 
especially of some thorns that can torment us. 
Certainly We do feel the pain of personal defect, 
and very naturally, because the standard of 
physical beauty and perfection is a thing civil- 
ized, and sensible men can no more alter than 
they can alter the standard of geometry. It was 
beautifully right in that old Mosaic religion which 
worshipped only Law, to enact that all offerings 
made to God should be physically perfect. The 
Lawgiver wanted to touch in this way the truth 
of physical perfection. It was wise and good, 
too, as far as it went, that the old Greek should 
so carefully keep the ideal beauty he dreamed of 
as the perfection of humanity actually embodied 
in marble and bronze before the eyes of his race. 
I have heard it doubted whether the mother sees 
what we see when one of her children fails of 
this standard. I know you can never guess she 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 33 

does from any word that falls from her lips ; but 
she reveals her sense of it all the same, as the 
angels would reveal it, if such a thing as this im- 
perfection were possible in heaven, by a brooding, 
watchful tenderness which knows no measure ; 
which will guard and keep from the child itself 
the sense of the absent gift, while it magnifies 
immeasurably the gifts that are there. There is 
such a sense of what is fair and true in the out- 
ward appearance always in the common heart, 
that if we did not know this, we could still guess 
it, as we see the ceaseless efforts which are 
made to hide what are thought to be defects, as 
well as to create what are thought to be beauties, 
but are often blank deformities, like that mincing 
fall from the line of uprightness, just now the 
fashion among women. We admire and value 
physical .perfection. We notice and pity defects, 
or laugh at them if we have a bad heart. There 
are those who have to endure them, to whom they 
are a thorn in the flesh, bringing keen suffering 
sometimes, always casting something of a shadow, 
and begetting a morbid brooding in some natures 
far worse than they themselves can ever be. A 
feeling of bitterness, a sense of unfairness, and a 
3 



34 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



wish that everything else in life could be bar- 
tered for this one thing, — perfection of the form 
or face. 

Then, again, Paul's thorn in the flesh may have 
been a defect in his utterance. I can see what 
a thorn it is to many, that they can never 
adequately express their thought. They hear 
men talk, as oil runs, word slipping after word, 
without break or end, until the vessel is ex- 
hausted ; or read essays and histories, in which 
the words fall into their place like music ; but 
in the orator or the writer they can see well 
enough that the thought bears no sort of pro- 
portion to the expression, while they feel they 
have something to say which would weigh with 
thinkers if they could only once get it out of its 
matrix ; but it is like a diamond away down 
among the sunless pillars of the world, and there 
it is likely to stay. " You will find him to be a 
great lumbering wagon, loaded with ingots of 
gold," Robert Hall said of John Foster, when 
some congregation wrote to him and wanted to 
know whether Foster would do for a minister 
for their church, " and I hope you know gold 
when you see it, or else he will never do for 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



35 



yon." They called him, and he failed, as he had 
failed in Dublin and Newcastle, and I do not know 
where besides. " Brother Foster," William Jay 
of Bath said to him once, " why don't yon come 
and preach in my pulpit ? I have been after you 
for years ; my people want to hear you very 
much ; now, why don't you come ? " " Brother 
Jay," Foster sai(J, " I love to feel there is one 
pulpit in England in which I can- preach still, 
— it is yours. Now, if I preach only once for 
you, as you want me, I shall not have a pulpit. I 
mean to hold on to my one chance." But we pos- 
sess two volumes of lectures by John Foster, that 
are among^the grandest things of their sort in 
existence. They were born, as he tells us, with 
a sore travail, and given to a handful of people. 
He stands for my thought of this thorn in the 
flesh, that is just a dull aching to get expres- 
sion for what is in the mind. Great numbers 
have it, in one way and another. It might 
not seem so from the deluge of words that is 
swamping church and commonwealth together; 
but it is so ; and " I am slow of speech," is a 
very sad cry, as you hear it from such a man as 
first said it. 



36 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



Nothing but Paul's saintliness again, and sure 
footing in dangerous places, has saved him from 
the guess that his thorn in the flesh was some 
sort of a bad passion or appetite. Very sore is 
this pain, and very common, and by no means so 
criminal as we sometimes think it is. In the far- 
reaching influences that go to every life, and away 
backward, as certainly as away forward, children 
are sometimes born with appetites fatally strong 
in their nature. As they grow up, the appetite 
grows with them, and speedily becomes a pas- 
sion, the passion a master, the master a tyrant, 
. and by the time he arrives at his manhood the 
man is a slave. There is no doctrine that de- 
mands a larger vision than this of the depravity 
of human nature. I believe, in the judgment- 
day, which comes at last to every soul, two men 
may stand before the great white throne together, 
one with a great many bad things to answer for, 
and the other with very few ; yet the one who ap- 
pears to be the greater criminal, shall be deemed 
the better man ; because he has fought his battle 
at a vast disadvantage, while the other has had 
everything in his favor.. The worse man, as we 
have to call him, found when he got fairly into 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



37 



life, that these appetites and passions would rage, 
and tear, and trample over him, and had to be 
mastered at last by endeavors which would have 
saved ten men no worse tempted than the one 
who stands beside him. " Why don't you make 
an effort and put your passion down, once for 
all," a good friend of mine, a preacher, said to 
one of these poor sinners. " Doctor," he replied, 
" I've tried more, and harder, I believe, than you 
need try twenty times over, and I am nothing 
but an old sinner still." You see it is like two 
men coming of age, and getting each one a 
farm, and going to work to raise a crop. The 
one farm is fair and sweet, has been watched and 
tended and kept in good order; the other is as 
full of weeds and briers as a place can be, with all 
the fences down, and neglect wherever you turn. 
Now, what merit is there in the one man's keep- 
ing the good place good, in comparison with that 
by which the other has made the bad place 
better. Old Dr. Mason used to say, as much 
grace as would make John a saint, would barely 
keep Peter from knocking a man down. The 
appetite which has grown into a passion, that 
needs to be bitted and bridled, or guarded as you 



38 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



guard wild beasts within iron bars, is a thorn in 
the flesh, a dreadful sharp thorn, from which its 
possessor can never be free, as men are free who 
possess a nature full of fine balances ; and to be a 
man at last under such disadvantages, not to 
mention a saint, is as fine a piece of grace as can 
well be seen. Everywhere about us there are 
those who feel this thorn. I heard a man say 
once, that for eight and twenty years the 
soul within him had to stand, like an unsleep- 
ing sentinel, guarding his appetite for strong 
drink. 

And so I might go on to tell almost endlessly 
about these thorns in the flesh. With one man, it 
is every now and then a black day, like those that 
came to Luther ; with another, it is the bitter 
memory of a great sin, or a great wrong, or a 
great mistake, which stays like a ghost, and can- 
not be laid. It is a pain in the citadel of life with 
another, that can never be removed, but will rack 
and wrench at its own will, in spite of all that the 
doctors can do. While with men like great 
Edward Irving, and Robert Hall, and Jonathan 
Swift, it is the fine edge, as sharp as that over 
which the Mussulman dreams he will pass into 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



39 



Paradise, dividing the most transcendent genius 
from its saddest ruins. 

Now, then, secondly, I was to ask what we 
can do about it. I say, we ourselves can do one 
of two very different things, — we can make 
the best of it, or the worst of it. And I do not 
mean just now what Paul did with his thorn 
when he went to the Infinite Mercy about it, but 
what we can do about ours, apart from the ques- 
tion of that Divine Power to help us, which I shall 
have to mention thirdly, as the most blessed thing 
of all. If I find myself, for instance, in early life 
in the possession of a passion that is rapidly grow- 
ing into a curse, I can submit to its dictate with- 
out a struggle, as I see some do, can give in to its 
fascination with a shameful subservience, I can 
let it drag me down into its caves and devour me 
alive, or I can stand up and fight it ; I do not 
say conquer, I say fight with all the might there 
is in me ; fight for my life as I would fight for my 
home, and my wife and children, or anything 
that is supremely worth fighting for ; because 
I take it, that apart from God's grace, there 
is a certain manliness possible to every man 
who is still in any sense in possession of himself. 



40 



THE THOKN IN THE FLESH. 



I notice the police in London have lately assert- 
ed they never feel in any danger from the secret 
malice of the London thieves, no matter how often 
they may have brought them into trouble, if, as 
they say, they have been on the square with them, 
told the exact truth about their rogueries, and 
shown them such fair play as even a rogue thinks 
he has a right to. It shows how even in that 
utterly lost life, one little spot is still clear for the 
growth of some poor spark of manliness, that shall 
maintain the difference between the truth and the 
lie, while yet the living depends upon perpetual 
falsehood. It is hard to imagine again, any man, 
as a rule, more empty of what we would call 
Eeligion, than the common soldier. . His whole 
life, poor fellow, makes it very hard for him to 
have any sense of it, and he has very little. 
But it has come out since the great Sepoy 
rebellion in India, that numbers of these men 
in the English army were offered the alternative 
of renouncing the Christian religion and embra- 
cing that of the rebels, or being murdered by all 
the horrible ways the hate and rage of the 
pagans could invent. It is believed that they 
died to a man : not one instance as yet has come 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



41 



to light of any common soldier giving way. He 
might not be a Christian, or have seen the inside 
of a church since he was carried there as a babe 
to be baptized. He might only use the name of 
him who died on the tree for blasphemy, and have 
no conception of the grace that abides forever at 
the heart of the holy church throughout all the 
world. But he was a man belonging on that 
side, and the pincers could not tear that simple 
manliness out of his heart, or the fire burn it 
out. He knew that his sisters and brothers sang 
the old hymns, and sent their children to the 
Sunday schools, and that the white-haired father 
and mother were at rest in the old churchyard. 
He knew no hymns, he had no children, he would 
be thrown to the tigers in the jungle what 
time his soul had gone out on its doleful way; 
but he was a man of that stock. He might 
meet them again. He would tell them, if he 
did, that he died with the Cross in his eyes and 
not the Crescent, and so he went to his doom. And 
so there may be manliness where there is little 
grace, if by grace you mean that gracious thing, 
a pure and holy life and a conscious religion. It 
is all I plead for in this second thought. I may 



42 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



have the thorn in my flesh of a personal blemish. 
I can bear it like a man, manfully and modestly, 
until it almost shines with beauty. I may be 
always aware of my painful unreadiness and 
inability to be what my nature assures me I 
might he. I can be so manly in bearing my 
burden that my silence shall be golden. I may 
find myself in possession of an enemy within my 
nature, more dangerous than the whole banded 
might of the world. I stand for something 
still ; I do not belong on that side ; I belong to 
the banner of the cross : a voice in my soul 
whispers, "Son of man, stand upon thy feet ! 
" Did I break down ? was I unmanned ? " one of 
the great men I have mentioned said, when the 
thorn in the flesh had hurt him so terribly that 
he lost his consciousness. He felt he must be a 
man even then. Indeed, I know no one condition 
of life in which the thorn can pierce us, which can 
reveal a more beautiful manliness or womanli- 
ness than our quietness through intense phys- 
ical, or mental, or spiritual pain. To be steady 
then, is to be steady indeed. I bow before 
such valor with a bare head. To see the pa- 
tient face on which pain has graven its lines, 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



43 



reflecting an unconquered soul, is to be aware of 
a royalty to which the purple robe and acclama- 
tion are a vain show. 

I said, thirdly, we must see what can come 
of the thorn in the flesh, if we find out Paul's 
way of dealing with it. 

From what he feels it clearly appears he can 
tell us about his own particular case, that he 
tried the best he knew ; bore his trouble man 
fashion, as well as he could ; but then found 
he was still unable to win much of a victo- 
ry. The pain was there still, and perhaps the 
shame of it, and he felt as if he would have to 
give way at last, and go down, as Christian did 
when he was fighting Apollyon. So, in the sim- 
ple old fashion, he took the matter into the 
Supreme Court, and said, " I want this thorn 
removed : I can bear it no longer. I am sick of 
trying to get along with it." But the Judge 
said, ci No, it must stay : that is in the nature 
of things, and cannot be altered. To take it away 
would be to destroy the grace to which it points. 
I will not take the bane, but I will give you 
another blessing." 

Lately, when I crossed Suspension Bridge, I 



44 THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 

got talking with a gentleman about the crys- 
tallization of iron. We agreed that every train 
which crossed the bridge did something to 
disintegrate the iron particles and break the 
bridge down. It was clear to us both, that if 
this process could go on long enough, there 
would be a last train, which would shoot right 
down into the green, boiling gulf, with all the 
horrors of the terrible catastrophe. But we con- 
cluded this would probably never come to pass, 
because we are rinding out how long it takes to 
crystallize a piece of iron; and so, before there is 
any great danger, all these strands and cables 
will be made over again in the fire and under the 
hammer, and come out as strong and good as 
ever; so the fire and hammer, in such a case, 
would be in themselves the best blessing that 
can- come to these ever-weakening strands. 
Nothing else could do them* any good. To take 
them out, put others in, and then let these lie at 
rest on the banks of the Niagara, would be no 
sort of use. The iron-masters would laugh at 
you for doing that. They would say, " That 
will do more harm than good ; it will make the 
strands eternally unfit for their purpose : only the 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



45 



hammer and fire can make them very good, and 
these can make them better and stronger than 
ever." Is not this also the law of life, that the 
fineness and strength essential to our best being, 
and to make us do our best work, come by the 
hammer and the fire ? by the thorn in the flesh, the 
trouble and pain in our life, which may act in us 
as the fire acts in the iron, welding the fibre afresh, 
and creating the whole anew (as the Apostle would 
say) unto good works ? We go along in our easy 
way, with nothing in particular to do or bear be- 
yond ordinary duties and burdens; and then there 
is nothing particular in our nature. But suddenly 
some great trouble comes, — some thorn in the 
flesh, — and breaks up the old monotony. The 
good time, in that sense, is over ; and then, 
though we may feel sore, and savage about it, 
towards the Providence that is above us, we 
are drawn towards those nearest to us with 
a new tenderness and trust. The strands that 
bind us are better ; we are better men and 
women. I dare trust the worst brute in this 
city to be good to his wife, if ho has helped to 
nurse the buried babe she is breaking her heart 
about. The thorn, for the time he feels it, has 



46 



THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 



made a man of him. And so we touch, right 
here, the element in the strength that Paul had, 
while he had the thorn. The trouble itself, what- 
ever it was, held the new power. He found it 
was as much more to his life, as Calvary is more 
than Canaan" to the life of the world, and then 
he gave up all idea of getting rid of the thorn. 
So, as we can see that not the weddings, but the 
crucifixions, are the mighty things of history ; 
not the festivals, but the battles ; not the ova- 
tions, but the martyrdoms, — we find the first grace 
that can come from Heaven to help us bear our 
thorn in the flesh, whatever it be, — a personal 
misfortune ; inability to be all that we feel we 
ought to be ; the possession of a passion we have 
to watch with unslumbering care ; pain that defies 
all doctors ; darkness of the spirit, against which 
there is no argument ; the sore of a bitter old 
sin ; a home in which there is no light of 
a true love ; a great and incurable disappoint- 
ment ; or the death of our brightest and best 
— I say these may be the very conditions of 
the grace which is made "perfect in our weak- 
ness." Joyfulness has its own place; glad- 
ness is the wine of life ; but the life-blood 



THE THOKN IN THE FLESH. 47 

comes of the struggle, and the Saviour is the Man 
of Sorrows. Yet Ave can never be sure of this 
as we should be, until the great thing Paul 
had, to make the best of his thorn, is ours also, 
and that is, the uplifting and out-going of the 
heart to God. The out-going of the heart in 
faith, and prayer, and patience ; and the confi- 
dence, that while I rest in the sense of my 
Father's wisdom and love, and do the best I 
can, things will be just about what they should 
be, and would be, if I were the sole being besides 
the Father in the universe, and he had no 
thought but to make everything come into har- 
mony with my desire. It is always the old his- 
tory over again we have to realize, before we 
can be entirely at rest. The cup is held to our 
lips, and we shrink back, and cry, " Let this pass 
from me ; " but then the soul says, " The cup 
that my Father has given me, shall I not drink 
it?' 7 and we say, "Thy will be done," and then 
there is quiet. The sun shines in the soul then, 
though it is black night outside ; and though 
we have to bear after that the kiss of the traitor, 
and the curse of the fiend, and the crown of 
thorns, all in the flesh together, and the cross and 



48 THE THORN IN THE FLESH. 

shame, we can bear all, and be all, while we 
rest hVGod, and look up to our great Forerunner, 
whose life, from the time he came forth to help 
us bear our burdens was one long pain, the 
thorn always hurting: that so we might learn 
how the way to the loftiest life in heaven may 
lie through the roughest ways of earth. 

" Tis alone of His appointing 

That. our feet on thorns have trod ; 
Suffering, pain, renunciation, 
Only bring us nearer God. 

" Strength sublime may rise from weakness, 
Groans be turned to songs of praise; 
Nor are life's divinest labors 
Only told by songs of praise." 



III. 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 

Matthew xx. 9 : " He gave every man a penny." 

I suppose we have all noticed the curious diver- 
sity of the seeds we sow in the spring. There 
are some that shoot out and grow up days before 
the others from the same paper, sown in the 
same bed, and that seemed exactly like the rest. 
It is so with a number of fruit trees in a young 
orchard. Each tree may get an equal care, and 
appear to have the same natural advantages, but 
one will spring out into an early fruitfulness^ 
while another holds back, summer after summer, 
and perhaps, only when the husbandman begins to 
despair of its ever doing any good, it bears fruit. . 

It is so with boys. One lad will be bright and 
promising, the joy of his tutor, and the pride of 
his mother, right from the start ; no one can tell 
exactly how he learned his letters ; they seemed to 
come to him by instinct ; he knew them when he 
saw them, or, as Plato would say, he re-collected 
4 49 



50 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 



them. But another lad, on the same form, perhaps 
in the same family, is dull and backward ; he has 
quite forgotten his first letters before he learned 
the last. But after a good while there is the dawn 
of a new day ; then the backward boy has a whole 
sunrise to himself, and opens out into an equal 
manhood with the best of his brighter fellows. 

It is so again with woman in the experi- 
ences and life of the heart. A shrinking, retir- 
ing, near-sighted woman waits and waits among 
the Yorkshire hills, saying, wistfully, to herself, 
" What shall I do ? " It has been a long, sore trial 
to wait and watch as she has done. In her life- 
time she has known not a few of her own age who 
have long since solved that problem : some are 
wedded and happy in their homes ; others have 
found their true place as teachers, writers, or 
artists, and are crowned already with honor. 
*This woman has had great sorrows, and sore 
losses, and her day is wearing on into the af- 
ternoon, still she has heard no voice bidding 
her go work in the vineyard. There is a letter 
written to Wordsworth while she stands there in 
the market-place waiting for the Master, that is, 
in my opinion, the most pathetic cry ever heard 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 



51 



in our lifetime. " Sir/' 7 she says, " I earnestly 
entreat yon to read and judge what I have sent 
you. From the day of my birth to this day I 
have lived in seclusion here among the hills, 
where I could neither know what I was nor what 
I could do. I have read, for the reason that I 
have eaten bread, because it was a real craving 
of nature, and have written on the same principle. 
But now I have arrived at an age when 1 must do 
something. The powers I possess must be used 
to a certain end ; and as I do not knowthem my- 
self, I must ask others what they are worth: 
there is no one here to tell me if they are worthy ; 
and if they are worthless, there is no one to tell 
me that. I beseech you to help me." What she 
sends to Wordsworth then, is poor ; she has writ- 
ten many volumes, all poor ; has waited in the 
market-place and done no work ; but at last, the 
Master, walking there, sees her wistful face 
turned towards him, and says, " Go into my vine- 
yard." Then she bends over some small folded 
sheets of coarse paper until her face almost 
touches them, and in one book she storms the 
heart of England and America, and in the one 
hour that was left her she won her penny. 



52 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 



Another woman sits in her room in pleasant old 
Canterbury ; her life has been lonely also, and she 
says to herself, " What shall I do ? " She feels 
about and finds a pen, and it is not hard to 
see that there is a gift of God in the things she 
is doing long before she takes her great place ; 
still it is only waiting. The Master comes, 
and the voice says, " Go work in my vineyard." 
Then, as she wiles us with the story of a wo- 
man, who was a Methodist and a preacher, and 
tells of the fortunes of those who were subject to 
her irresistible sway, she opens such hidden wells 
of tender truth and goodness, and dear homely 
humanity, as this world hardly believed could be 
treasured in its heart in these latter days ; and 
now in other books following that, she has gone 
into the first rank of those that work for God 
in that corner of his vineyard, and has won her 
penny. 

It is so again in the world of men. One man starts 
ahead, and distances all about him ; he will never 
have an equal, is the verdict of the world ; anoth- 
er, of the same age, stands where he was placed. 
At last something stirs him, and he starts too ; and 
while the first man never stops, the last comes up 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 



53 



and runs abreast, or goes ahead. Charles Dickens 
sits in his chambers in London in the full fame 
of his Pickwick Papers. He is preparing a new 
book, to be brought out as that was, with illustra- 
tions. A man comes in, older than himself, but 
still a young man, and says, " I have come, sir, 
to show you some drawings, and to get the place, 
if I can, of artist for your new story." The 
young author glances over the sketches, and 
then says, kindly, "They will not do." The 
man goes home, puts aside his pencil, partially, 
and takes a pen. He works for years after this, 
writing small books and pieces for magazines, but 
wins no notice, and is almost altogether unknown. 
One day, however, he goes to a bookseller in 
London with a new work, asks him to print it, 
and fails to persuade him. Another agrees to do 
it, with fear of the result ; but when the book is 
printed, the most popular writer in Britain has, 
from that day, a divided kingdom. And when 
this man died, suddenly, some years ago, tens 
of thousands, who had never seen his face, 
mourned for him as for a dear friend ; and now 
vast numbers, of the truest insight, will tell 
you that the poor artist, whose work was kindly 



54 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 



refused, was the first man of his age in the 
department of letters, in which he once would 
have been glad and proud to be a servant of 
one of the servants of the Master who hires and 
pays us all. 

It is so again in our practical common life. 
One man begins" early, and is a notable man 
from the start. He goes on in his career, gather- 
ing honor and success ; the common heart is in his 
hand ; when he speaks all listen ; when he writes 
all read. Another works hard on a frontier farm, 
or teaches a country school, or tries a flat-boat on 
the river, feeling dimly all the while that this is 
only waiting ; the time has not come for him to 
enter the vineyard. But at last, as he stands 
watching and waiting, the voice says, " Go 
thou also ; " and presently those who have been 
the longest at work feel that he will win his 
penny. He had but one or two hours ; he suffers 
no loss ; he stands, at last, abreast of the very 
foremost of all. 

This is true again of the spiritual life. The 
old prophet kept his flock, or followed his plough ; 
and the old scholar drank at all the fountains of 
wisdom and inspiration. Josephus and Philo are 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 



55 



masters in the highest attainments of their age ; 
J ohn and Peter are peasants and fishermen j 
Paschal and Jeremy Taylor seem as if they were 
born for the sacred robes, so early and so beauti- 
fully do they wear them ; John Bunyan is, to all 
seeming, a born tinker, and George Fox a born 
cobbler. So there is for them a long waiting and 
watching, and the cry, " What shall I do ? " At 
last the voice says, " Go thou also." Then the 
grace and glory of the vines they have tended 
are a world's wonder, and their fruit a world's 
blessing. 

This is true, finally, of our country. England 
and Germany begin in the early morning, and in 
the wild woods of Britain and Gaul, to earn their 
penny ; and it is their lot for long centuries to 
toil, winning, as they can, this and that from the 
wilderness, — trial by jury, Magna Charta, free 
speech, free press, free pulpit, — and when many 
hours are past, and much hard work is done, a 
voice comes to a new nation, and tells of a new 
world, and says, " Go work there ; " and when the 
old world looks up, the new is abreast of those 
nations that have borne the burden and heat of 
the day, and will have its penny. And in this 



56 EVERY MAN A PENNY. 

new world itself, there are men living here in 
Chicago, who can remember very* well when our 
great prairies lifted their faces wistfully to the 
sun, and cried, u No man hath hired us ; " when 
our streets, now so full of life, sounded only 
to the voice of the mighty waters and the cry 
of the savage. Now the whole civilized world 
has to come and see what has been done. 
Not many years more will pass, we who live 
here believe, before this new worker will be 
abreast of the oldest, and will win her penny. 
For so God comes and goes : selecting, calling, 
and settling all things according to the counsel of 
his own will. No man can stay his hand, or say, 
What doest thou ? He sitteth in the heavens, 
and his kingdom is in all the earth. "For the 
kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a 
householder, which went out early in the morn- 
ing, and at the third hour, and at the sixth, 
and at the ninth, and at the eleventh hour, and 
hired laborers for a penny a day. So when the 
even was come, the Lord said, Call the laborers, 
and give them their hire, beginning from the first 
even unto the last. And they that came first, 
and they that came last, received every man his 
penny." 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 



57 



The parable is said to be meant for a lesson to 
the Jews at the moment when God was about 
to call the Gentiles into his vineyard also, and 
give them a place they had never filled before in 
working out his will. It is possible this mean- 
ing may lie within the parable in some re- 
mote way ; but I cannot believe that this is 
all the Saviour meant when he spoke to the 
Jews. The truth is, that then as now, and for- 
ever, there are great numbers of men and women 
waiting in the market-place, in all sorts of ways, 
watching for the coming of the Master to set them 
to work ; to give them their true place in this 
life ; the place they know they can fill — men and 
women who have never found their calling, and 
yet have never ceased to watch for it, and wait 
with weary, hungry, patient eyes, and to say, 
" What shall I do ? " We look at them, very likely, 
as we stand in our place doing our work, and 
despise them for what we call their shiftlessness ; 
when if we did but know the whole truth, we 
might wonder over them for their power to do 
what is harder than any hard work ever could be 
to such natures, — to wait for work, such as they 
ought to do, and hear no command to go. These 



58 EVERY MAN A PENNY. 

were in the world then as they are now 7 and this 
Divine soul, which saw everything that had a sor- 
row in it , saw them; and the heart that had a 
sympathy, sweet and abundant as a full honey- 
comb, took them all in, and then cried to the 
Father to know the truth about this ; and the 
truth came in this parable of those that work, and 
those that wait ; touching with its consolation the 
waiters, too ; giving them their place in life and 
their promise ; and bidding the worker pause in 
his hasty judgment of those who wait until he is 
quite sure that the waiter is not the most wor- 
thy of the two. 

For this, I think, must be clear, first of all, as we 
study this mystery of waiters and workers, there 
can be no pleasure in waiting, in standing all the 
day idle, and looking wistfully, as the hours pass 
by, for some one to hire us, feeling the beat and 
tingle in nerve and brain that would gladly find 
some worthy task where nothing worthy comes. 
It is not the young man whose whole career is a 
constant success, or the young woman who finds 
her home or her place at once in life ; not these 
the tender intention of the parable touches first 
and last : it is the young man who has to stand 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 



59 



back, and notice painfully how he is distanced 
by his fortunate or clever companions who go 
right on ; and the woman, whose hair, by and by, 
•begins to show threads of silver while she is 
compelled to look wistfully and wofully into the 
silent heavens, into the deeps of our human life, 
everywhere watching for the coming of the Lord, 
who shall tell her what to do. Yet the day wears 
on, and she cries, as one hour strikes after another, 
"Woe is me ! What shall I do ?" It is the man 
who is dimly conscious of power and purpose 
somewhere within his soul, yet is compelled, 
year after year, to toil on twenty acres of hard- 
scrabble, or push a flat-boat, or teach a district 
school and board round, aware all the time that 
this is only waiting for the coming of the Lord, 
— yet to wait, and watch, and hear no voice. 
It is into these wistful eyes the compassionate 
Christ looks as he speaks his parable, and not into 
ours, who are working where we want to be, and 
feel sure of our wages. 

And this, if I understand the parable, is the 
first consolation we touch in it, and good for all 
time. The ultimate reason why some have to 
stand and wait, who sorely want to work, rests not 



60 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 



with us at all, but with the Lord ; who calls us 
when he will, and gives us our reward ; not 
merely for working faithfully, but for waiting 
faithfully as well. It shows us that away down 
within this want of power to see and do, we are 
to believe in the will of God concerning us. So 
that what we see in such lives as I have touched, 
for example, we must see in the life of every 
worthy man and woman who has to wait and 
watch; who tries and fails, and has to stand back, 
God knows why, we say in our pride, and they 
in their patience. We are both right; God does 
know why ; and that is the most intimate reason. 
He has determined it shall be so, that his pur- 
pose may be answered in that one life, and in the 
whole commonwealth of the world. As we seem 
to see the things through a glass darkly, when we 
notice how he kept North America waiting when 
China was called, and then kept the "West waiting 
when the East was called ; waiters and workers, 
— this has always been the Divine order. Lands, 
nations, providences, discoveries, the whole world, 
outside the personal life of the man and woman, 
are full of my parable. 

So, then, when I see a young man slow and 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 61 

$ 

backward, and in a poor place, whose soul I know 
would expand in the sunshine of prosperity and 
fill a better place ; or a woman, waiting with her 
unfulfilled life in her heart, willing to give it in 
any high, pure fashion to the Lord, if he will but 
come and take it ; or a preacher, with a mighty 
power to preach somewhere in his nature, if he 
could only find the clew to it ; or a man who has 
waited through his lifetime for the Lord to show 
him the true church, the place where he can feel 
that the religious heart of him is at rest ; — if in 
these things, or in any of them, I feel I have 
found my place, and am doing my work, I must 
feel very tenderly, and judge very generously, all 
the waiters in all these ways ; must call up this 
picture of the faces so wistful in the old market- 
place, watching for the coming of the Lord : " Who 
has made me to differ, who has called me at the 
first hour, why do I succeed where others fail ? " 
It is the gift of God ; it is not of works, lest any 
man should boast. It is the difference between 
the seed the husbandman, for his own good rea- 
son, will leave dark and still in the granary, and 
the seed he sows which can spring at once to the 
sun and the sweet airs of summer. It is the 



62 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 



difference in the home, in our conduct towards 
our children, when we know it is best to let one 
go forward in the school and keep another back ; 
yet both decisions come out of our heart's best 
love, and are made through what we know, but the 
children do not know, of their present and future. 
So this working and waiting lies in the will of 
God, and God is my Father, and this is the pre- 
destination of my Father's love. 

There is another thing in this parable we must 
not miss ; I have touched it already, but not all it 
needs : it is the eager wistfulness and readiness 
in those faces of the waiters ; the sure sign that 
when they are called, they will be ready to go. 
If they had been indifferent or asleep, the Master 
might have passed them by; if they had not 
been ready also in the sense of knowing what to 
do, they would have had only disgrace and no 
penny. The two great sources of failure, when 
the fault lies at all in ourselves, are to be found 
first, in not keeping our heart and life awake 
to the call of God, and, second, in not knowing 
how to take hold when we are called. Every 
man and woman who has achieved a real success 
in any way whatever, from the forging of a 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 



63 



horse-shoe to the saving of a soul, succeeded 
through being ready when the call came. You 
believe that a lucky hit, as we call it, made 
them what they are. I tell you, Nay ; what- 
ever has come out of the head, and heart, and 
hand of any man or woman, first went into it 
in some quick, genuine, human fashion. They 
builded better than they knew, but they knew 
they builded : John Bunyan was the pilgrim 
who made the Progress ; George Fox quaked 
and trembled, it was Wesley's methods that 
made the Methodist ; and before the slaves could 
be free, Garrison must be bound with them. No 
man or woman ever won the penny by accident. 
If you will be sure that the longing you feel for 
something better is not to end in disgrace when 
your call comes, you must now be gathering the 
ideas and aptitudes that will insure the place ; 
keep your whole life open and ready ; then when 
the Master comes, and says, "That is the place 
you are to fill, and the work you are to do," 
you shall find that to you, as fully as to those 
that were called before you, comes the full re- 
ward. 

There is one thing more ; it has lurked in some 



64 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 



of your hearts and minds all the time I have 
been talking. You say you can tell me of men 
and women who never could do what they 
longed to do, but only had it in them to do it, 
and could never get it out ; men and women as 
noble as those I have mentioned for illustration, 
and as good, but lonely and unknown to the last, 
and they died hearing no call from the Master, but 
only waiting until the sun set and they went home. 
Yes, and I myself have known such men and wo- 
men, whose lot, from the place where I stood look- 
ing at it, seemed as sad as a tragedy ; and yet this 
was the wonder of it, that somehow they them- 
selves were generally among the most cheerful 
and happy people at last under the great canopy 
of heaven. For one thing they generally do get 
a poor little show of some sort before they get 
through, and it does them more good than we 
can tell. It does not take much coin to come to 
a penny, but a penny to them has a wonderful 
worth ; they feel somehow, at last, as a rule, with 
very few exceptions, that, taken altogether, their 
lines have fallen in pleasant places. And then 
standing there, watching and waiting, there have 
come to them a patience and power that seldom 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 



65 



come to the prosperous and happy — to those 
that have everything they want. 

I think the most heart-whole man I ever 
knew, was a man who had waited and watched; 
breaking stones through all weathers on the 
cold shoulder of a Yorkshire hill, and he could 
hardly see the stones he had to break he was 
so sand blind. His wife was dead and all his 
children; his hut was open to the sky, and to 
the steel-cold stars in winter: but when once 
one said, to comfort him, " Brother, you will 
soon be in heaven ! " he cried out in his rap- 
ture, " I have been there this ten years ! " 
And so when at last the angel came to take him, 
he was not unclothed, but clothed upon ; mortali- 
ty was swallowed up of life. 

I treasure a small drawing by Millais. It is 
the figure of a woman bound fast to a pillar 
far within tide mark. The sea is curling its 
tides about her feet ; a ship is passing in full 
sail, but not heeding her or her doom ; birds of 
prey are hovering about her, but she heeds 
not the birds, or the ship, or the sea ; her eyes 
look right on, and her feet stand firm, and you 
see that she is looking directly into heaven, and 
5 



66 



EVERY MAN A PENNY. 



telling her soul how the sufferings of this present 
time are not worthy to be compared with the 
glory that shall be revealed ; and under the pic- 
ture is this legend, copied from the stone set up 
to her memory in an old Scottish kirkyard : — 

" Murdered for owning Christ supreme, 
Head of His Church, and no more crime. 
But for not owning prelacy, 
And not abjuring presbytery, 
Within the sea, tied to a stake, 
She suffered for Christ Jesus' sake." 

I treasure it, because when I look at it, it seems 
a type of a great host of women who watch and 
wait, tied fast to their fate, while the tide creeps 
up about them, but who rise as the waves rise, 
and on the crest of the last and loftiest are borne 
into the quiet haven, and hear the " Well-done ! " 



IV. 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 

Eom. vii. 4 : " Fruit unto God." 

It has come to me, now that the last fruits of 
the year are being gathered, to say something to 
you of the lesson that lies within our harvest, 
touching the harvest of life. And I want to 
speak of it in the light of the suggestion that 
rises naturally out of my text, and try, if I can, 
to find what is fruit unto God. What is fruit to 
us, is a question not very hard to answer ; but 
fruit to God, I propose to show, is unspeaka- 
bly more, look at it as we will, than what is 
fruit to us. 

And in doing this, I shall speak to you, — 

I. Of the vastness of his harvest compared 
with ours. 

II. Of its variety, and 

III. Of its ripening. 

First, then, we have to notice the difference 

67 



68 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



every harvest-time brings home to us between 
our conception and that of the Divine Providence, 
of what is really good fruit in the measure of it. 
It is at once quite evident, when we begin to 
look into it, that the gift of God in the harvest 
he ripens is so great, it can only be held in his 
own measure. We see it is not merely this gra- 
nary of ours that is full ; there is another granary 
besides this, in which a harvest is stored of seed 
for sowing, and bread for eating, to which this 
of ours is a mere handful, and all this is as good 
in its way, as the fruit and corn on which we have 
come to set such store. There are seeds so small 
that the human eye cannot see them, and fruits of 
the wilderness so manifold, as to far exceed, as 
yet, our power to find them out : they are scat- 
tered through all the zones of the world, from 
the Iceland moss in the Arctic circle to the palm- 
tree under the line. The whole world outside 
our little storehouse is one great ' granary, " a 
house not made with hands," in which things are 
laid up that are good, in one way or another, for 
all the families in the many mansions of the Maker 
and Provider, from whose fall hand we are all fed. 
Our good fruit in this light is one thing, his 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



69 



good fruit another ; and so, as the heavens are 
higher than the earth, his thought of what is 
good must be higher than our own. 

Whatever we may think of the thorns and 
thistles that came up outside Eden to curse the 
land, what he said was good, when he made the 
earth bring forth grass, and the herb yielding 
seed, and the fruit-trees yielding fruit after their 
kind, is good still ; there has been no debase- 
ment of this Divine husbandry ; no empty gra- 
nary of God; no failure of the field. He tills for 
the multitude that cry to him for bread. I look 
up, at the end of .the harvest that he has gathered, 
and the wonder and joy of it seem to me un- 
speakable. He crowns the year with his good- 
ness to every living thing. 

This is true again, when we turn from the vast- 
ness of this treasure to its variety. We get 
some sense of this from what we agree to call 
good fruit. We see how the corn differs from 
the apple, and the grape from the chestnut ; how 
the plum can never be like the melon, or the 
walnut as the blackberry ; and in this variety 
there is a blessing that could neVer be found, if 
the best of all the things God has given us could 



70 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



have been selected for our sole use, and poured 
out upon us from his hand in the full measure of 
our wishes. 

So I cannot find in my heart to condemn Israel 
for crying out against the manna, good as it seems 
to have been, and full of nourishment, when they 
found that was all they had; and then that th-ey 
should look back longingly to Egypt, by and by, 
and hanker after the cucumbers and melons, the 
variety of the good fruit they had left in the old 
country ; and then when quails came, that they 
should devour them with such eagerness as to 
bring on a plague. 

I do not find that with the heavenly manna 
there was any alteration in the human appetite : 
that remained as it always had been ; it remained, 
therefore, to torment them ; it was not in their 
human nature to be content with angels' food, so 
long as they were still in the flesh. And I have 
no idea of what was grown in Eden ; but I know 
that if Eden did not grow such a variety in its 
harvests as this that now blesses all civilized 
men, it was not so good a place to live in, in some 
respects, as tins city, and would not be so likely 
to satisfy the whole demand of our life. Let 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



71 



this be as it may, the variety that we ourselves 
take note of, is as divine as the abundance. Yet 
it is but a fragment of the whole variety that is 
harvested in the garners of G-od. We are con- 
stantly coming into possession of some new fruit 
or seed that brings a new blessing ; but beyond 
that, other races have their blessings, differing 
from ours, specially adapted to their sustenance 
and joy. And then there is a vast store of things 
that ripen every harvest, we know very little 
about, or take to be worthless, but in their own 
place and for their own purpose they are all good 
fruits. The variety in the harvest that God reaps 
is as wonderful as the vastness. 

So it is again when we turn from the har- 
vest to the harvest-time. We naturally think 
of what is gathered now, and laid up for the 
bleak days that are coming. But the truth is, 
ever since the snow-drop came up through the 
snow, and blessed us in the wild, spring weather, 
there has been a perpetual ingathering of ripe 
things. The spring blossoms ripened when our 
eyes had been gladdened, and our hearts had fed 
on their beauty and sweetness, and when their 
time came they passed away ; they are harvested 



72 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



in the granaries of life ; the corruptible has put 
on incorruption, and the mortal, immortality ; they 
are not in our memory merely, but in our being. 
* The first fruits of summer came: it was or- 
dained of Heaven that they should not wait for 
the later harvest ; they must ripen in June, or 
not at all ; and so they ripened and were gath- 
ered, and reckoned in the harvest of the year. 
There were other fruits that came to their perfec- 
tion in the strong sun of August. They must be 
gathered when they were ripe : they could not 
wait for the early frosts ; and they are a part 
of the harvest too, just as truly as the grapes 
and corn. The completeness of harvest, then, 
is in the great span of it ; and we only under- 
stand the whole truth of what is fruit unto God,* 
when we understand and feel how good it is for 
our life to take in this long ripening, together 
with the vastness and variety. No human eye 
may ever see myriads of blessings we must 
count in the harvest of God, and yet the blue-bell, 
waving in the wilderness, shall be a sky of azure 
fretted with gold for a host of God's creatures 
living under its vast dome and rejoicing in the 
completeness of its blessing. 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



73 



This, then, is the truth about the harvest we 
are completing. We have one measure for it ; 
He who clothes the lilies and feeds the birds 
has another. We gather a few varieties ; he 
bids nature and his angels gather all. We 
think of this as the harvest-time : harvest be- 
gan when we felt the breath of the first snow- 
drop, and blessed it for heralding the glory of 
the year ; and this is the truth that fills the soul 
fullest of the goodness of God. The more com- 
pletely we can grasp the vastness, the variety, 
and the long ripening of the harvest, the more 
deeply we can feel the presence of his provi- 
dence and grace. 

I said the harvest of the year leads us on 
to the harvest of life : the vastness, and variety, 
and difference in the ripening of humanity, and 
the difference between our estimate of it and the 
estimate of Heaven. In my boyhood, when I 
listened to sermons, and through some years of 
the time I preached them, my idea of the harvest 
of Humanity, and what is good fruit to God, was 
very simple. A long, narrow strip in the great 
wilderness of the world bore good fruit, all the 
rest was left to grow things whose end is to 



74 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



rot , or to be burned. That was the way I was 
taught to believe in the harvest of Humanity, — 
the good fruit that the angels gathered ; and, God 
forgive me, it was the way I tried to teach 
others. Adam, Seth, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, 
Noah, Shem, and so down to Abraham and Lot, 
with a patch somewhere on one side for Melchis- 
edec ; then by Joseph and Moses, and the 
Judges to David, and by the Prophets down to 
Christ ; then from Christ, the narrow belt of the 
True Church in and out of the Church of Rome 
to the Eeformation, and then through the Puritans, 
down to this age. That was the way we got at 
the harvest of Humanity ; of what was especially 
worth garnering of all that grew in the wilder- 
ness of this world, for about six thousand years, 
as near as we could tell by Bishop Lowth's chro- 
nology. 

It is by no means the exclusive task of liberal 
Christianity now to deny this wretched, narrow 
dogma,* the best preachers of every faith in 
Christendom are proclaiming the truth, our 
preachers were among the first to proclaim from 
the pulpit, that fruit unto God is grown and 
gathered in every nation, and kindred, and peo- 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



75 



pie, and tongue. That Assyria, and Egypt, and 
Greece, and Rome, and Arabia, and Ethiopia, and 
Scandinavia, and old Gaul, bore their harvests as 
certainly as the Hebrew and Christian lands. That 
what the church and the preacher insisted on as 
the true harvest exclusively, is only the harvest 
of a few varieties, of which the noblest Christian 
fruit is no doubt the best of all, but that finds its 
full perfection too in what it draws from all the 
rest. 

This is the truth of the vastness, and variety, 
and long ripening of the harvest of God in the 
whole human family. The field is the world ; no 
narrow ribbon, but all the zones, from the equa- 
tor to the poles. It is the grand verity that 
Paul caught out of heaven as he stood on Mars 
Hill, and cried, God made the world, and all 
things tlierein. He giveth to all life, and breath, 
and all things. He hath made of one blood all 
nations of men to dwell on all the face of the 
earth, and he is not far from every one of us — 
the children of Cain as well as of Seth, of Ish- 
mael as well as Isaac, by the Iliads as surely as 
the Psalms, by Athens as by Jerusalem, by Pagan 
as by Christian Rome, and in Saracen as in Chris- 



76 



THE TWO HAEYESTS. 



tian Spain. Everywhere the harvest of Humanity 
has ripened through its infinite variety, and from 
the spring-time of the world to the autumn. 

We are gradually coming to the conviction 
again, that this is the truth about the divine in- 
gathering to-day — what is fruit unto God/ good 
men in all churches and out of them are saying, 
cannot be this small handful alone in the Chris- 
tian garner. That is no doubt the best wherever 
it comes to its full perfection, but there is a 
divine reaping where the Christian seed was 
never sown. This old idea of an exclusive good- 
ness and acceptance among Christians, is very 
much like what we see sometimes at our State 
fairs. Men come there who have set their 
hearts on some one thing, and given their life 
to its development. The consequence is, very 
naturally, that they cannot weigh the worth of 
quantities of good fruits and seeds which differ 
from theirs, or even from their special variety of 
the same thing, and have no faculty at all for 
estimating the good that is not good enough to 
be shown, but that lies in an -infinite wealth in 
the world outside the Fair ground. 

We have far too much of this in our churches 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



77 



still. We devote ourselves to the cultivation of 
our variety, and train our vision away, through 
our devotion, from seeing, as we should, what 
worth there is in the varieties to which we 
have given no attention. If we allow these 
to be good again, but not so good as ours, we 
think little of the great harvest of good out- 
side this wider circle. But there it is, filling 
the world with blessing. And so it is with the 
whole harvest of Humanity to-day. There * is 
not a nation or people anywhere that is not, 
according to its variety, bringing forth fruit to 
God — something good answering to its conditioD, 
as truly as the harvests answer to the zones of 
the world. It is not our sort ; perhaps we cannot 
see what use there is in it j it is not our business. 
What we have to do is to make the best of the 
corner of the vineyard the Master has given us, 
and then to believe that he will see to the rest, 
and will not let it run to waste. In China and 
India, as well as in America, the Lord of the 
harvest holds his own ; for the field is the 
world, and the reapers are the angels ; and in 
vastness, in variety, and in the span of the har- 
vest, it is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. 



78 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



This brings me to say again, that the same 
thing comes home to lis about the life that is 
close to ours. What I have said about Christian 
ideas of the multitudes of heathens all the world 
over, I must insist on in connection with those in 
our own land, who are not Christians, and never 
will be. I can no more believe that the mere 
handful of our countrymen who are gathered into 
churches are all that are going to be gathered 
into heaven, than that the barns and cellars of 
the country hold all the good that has ripened 
this fall. I am the last man, I trust, to say a 
word that shall seem to make the Christian faith 
and the Christian church anything else but what 
it is. What I will say is this, that the religious life 
is by no means confined to the Christian faith and 
churches. There is a very great deal we- never 
think of calling religion, that is still fruit unto 
God, and garnered by Him in the harvest. The 
fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, long 
suffering, gentleness, patience, goodness. I affirm, 
that if these fruits are found in any form, they 
are the fruits of the Spirit, whether you show 
your patience as a woman nursing a fretful child, 
or as a man attending to the vexing detail of 



THE TWO HAEVESTS. 



79 



a business, or as a physician following the dark 
mazes of sickness, or as a mechanic fitting the 
joints and valves of a locomotive ; being honest, 
and true besides, you bring forth fruit unto 
God. 

I went into a picture-store one day, and met a 
lady, who said, " Come and look at a picture." 
I suppose you have most of you seen it. 
There are two figures in it; one is a soldier — 
one of our own — wounded and sick, worn and 
weary, with a white face, and great, out-looking 
eyes, that seem as if they were watching for the 
chariot of heaven. The other is a Sister of 
Mercy, with a book in her hand, reading. She 
has one of those sweet, clear faces we all remem- 
ber, in which no trace of human passion glasses 
itself any more, but only the quietness and as- 
suranoe of a heart at rest. 

"What do you think of it? " my friend said. 
I expressed my sense of its beauty ; but then 
I had to tell her how sure I was that it was not 
the Sister, with her prayer-book, that stood for 
the pure, religious devotion of that scene ; the 
poor fellow there, almost dead, was, to me, the 
most religious of the two. I could not look be- 



80 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



hind him, as I could behind the woman, through 
long years of fasting, and prayer, and aspiration. 
That might be there, or it might not ; the prob- 
abilities were against it ; but what was there that 
I could see, was a love that could make the man 
leap out of his home to the front ; a joy that he 
could make his -breast a barrier for the mother- 
land ; peace in duty well done ; long suffering in 
the doing, down to that moment ; and gentleness, 
and patience, and goodness, ripening, evidently, 
as he lay there with a far-away look in his eyes, 
that saw then, only home and heaven. 

And so it is with this whole harvest of life ; it 
is infinitely vaster, as the harvest of the world is, 
than our estimate ; and God is here to see to 
every grain of it, as Nature sees to every grain 
that lies in her lap from April to October. 

" God, the Creator, does not sit aloof, 
As in a picture painted on a roof, 
Occasionally looking down from thence, — 
He is all presence and all providence." 

So it is again with the truth of variety. Men 
differ in their ways and in their nature as widely 
as the chestnut and cherry, or the walnut and 
the peach, and yet they may all be good men. 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 81 

Here, again, we set up our idea of what is good 
fruit in the face of heaven, and then find it hard 
to make out that there is much good in the world. 
We want men and women to be good according to 
the way we define goodness, and cannot believe in 
them if they cannot conform to our standard. A 
man may be as good at the heart of him as a man 
can be ; but if he be sharp or hard on the surface, 
we cannot quite believe in such goodness as that ; 
we never think that such a man is a chestnut or 
a walnut in the harvest of the year, as good in his 
own way as any. Others, again, are all sweetness 
until you get at their heart, and then you find a 
tang of bitterness and hardness you never ex- 
pected. You wonder whether they can be really 
good men. You might as well wonder whether 
there can be a good plum, or peach, or cherry. 
Some, -. again, are wrapped up in husks, that 
are dry, withered, and dead ; but down within 
the husk is the grain, and that is good, and you 
know it ; but you sorrow that the husk should 
be there, and never think it has to be there 
for a nature like that, or there would be no grain, 
and that by and by all this will be stripped away 
and done with. 

6 



82 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



The variety in the fruit of life is as divine as 
the abundance. Peter had a forbidding outside, 
with a heart as tender as ever beat ; and J ohn's 
heart, when you come close to him, was anything 
but tender ; but they were both saints for all that. 
Erasmus was, perhaps, the most fascinating man of 
his day ; Luther, to look at, one of the least. The 
good of Erasmus was more on the outside, of 
Luther, more within. They are both to be counted 
among the noblest children of God. Goldsmith 
was a pulp of a rare sweetness almost down at 
the core; Johnson had a goodness unspeakably dif- 
ferent, but quite as good, in one of the knottiest 
and hardest shells to look at that was ever seen. 
Stephen Girard was a by-word for what was hard 
and keen ; but once when the yellow fever raged 
in Philadelphia he was the first man in the town 
in his fearless devotion and sweet self-sacrifice for 
the sick and dying. We have one idea of good- 
ness, Heaven has another. 

In all sorts of husks and shells, hard, sharp, 
withered, and dead, God sees a goodness we 
are always missing, and counts and treasures it 
in the granary of heaven. We think of him too 
much as one walking through the world, looking 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



83 



only for the best, and rejecting, with aversion, 
what is not the best. I tell you when he goes 
forth with his reapers to gather his harvest, he 
looks as lovingly now as once he looked through 
the eyes of Christ, his Son, for all the good there 
is' everywhere. There may be only a single grain 
in October where he put in a grain in March : 
he bids his angels gather that as carefully as if 
it were a hundred fold. 

Then of the long ripening. The harvest we 
would have, if we had our way, would all be 
gathered in October. Our idea of Humanity is, 
that it should come to its end like corn fully ripe, 
or the apples that are only perfected in the frost, 
and we almost lay it up as a grudge against Heav- 
en that we cannot have it so. But ever since the 
world was, Humanity has had its long ripening. 
Delicate blossoms have bloomed in the spring 
that could never live to summer. Little children, 
the snowdrops of the year, young men and maid- 
ens, the early summer fruit, strong men in their 
prime, perfected in August, — so the harvest of 
Humanity has grown and been gathered from first 
to last. It is hard to see, through our tears, that 
this can be the divine way with us, and the most 



84 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



blessed way Heaven could contrive for our bless- 
ing. But with little children in heaven, that 
passed away like the snowdrops, and youth that 
ripened in its June, and true friends and kinsfolk 
that were perfected in their August, and left me 
to wait for the early or the latter autumn, or the 
winter, I cling to the conviction that the long- 
ripening was the divinest. I w r ould have kept 
them all ; my heart aches for them with an in- 
tolerable longing ; sometimes I wonder how it can 
be that God will be justified when he speaks to 
me of his perfect providence and infinite love in 
taking these from me. He will not argue. He 
will only ask what I think my life would have 
been had they never come to bless me in their 
seasons, and then to be taken away. It will be 
all right when it comes to that. 

This finally rounds itself with a word of ad- 
monition. First, that I shall not be content with 
my own poor limited vision of the harvest of 
Humanity. When I make my sense of the full- 
ness, and variety, and ripening of men the 
standard with which to measure the divine sense 
of it, it is as if I made my sense of what is 
gathered here in October tell the whole story of 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



85 



the year all over the world. Good fruit to God 
surpasses all conception that I can form either of 
its measure or of its variety. Second, this must 
not for one instant leave me careless about grow- 
ing to be my best, or of helping others to grow. It 
must only be an inspiration and incitement to me, 
as I feel there is so much more to encourage 
me than there would be if I believed that the 
most of what can be grown is only good to burn. 
It is good to garner under all its varieties. I shall 
not despair of anything. If only a little seed of good 
ripens, that little seed will never be lost. One 
of the worst women we ever had, says the matron 
of one of the great English prisons, was caught 
one day weeping over a daisy. Well, I think 
God's angels saw that woman weeping, and went 
and told it in heaven, and then there was joy 
there, for they knew that somehow, somewhere, 
some time, that " wee crimson tipped flower " 
would bring her, and be brought by her, through 
the golden gates. 

It is not for a moment my idea, last of all, 
that because the great Husbandman will cer- 
tainly make the best of the multitudes that are 



86 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



like the wild fruit of the wilderness, and of 
those that are like the smaller and more ordinary 
growth of the field and forest, and of all the rest 
we have been in the habit of leaving out of the 
measure of good fruit to God, — we are to be 
satisfied with anything short of the uttermost 
goodness, largeness, and ripeness we can possi- 
bly attain to. The worst farmer I ever knew, 
was a man who was always sure that his land- 
lord would not trouble him about either rent or 
crop, because his family had been, time out of 
mind, in the sunshine of their lord's favor. It 
is always the danger of our confidence in God's 
providence, that we shall come to think it will be 
satisfied with our improvidence. Only as we 
make the best of what we have, and so become 
the best we can be, shall we win the great " well- 
done ; " and no man or woman ought ever to be 
satisfied with anything less than, to try for it. 
Patience, perseverance, good endeavor through 
storm and shine, the uplifted heart, the pure life, 
the large sympathy, the faith that was in Christ, 
and the truth, and the love, — these will bring 
into my own life an ever-ripening perfection, and 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 



87 



save me from the poor perversity of thinking 
that God has not an infinite store of fruit as 
good as mine or better. 

" So will I gather strength and hope anew, 

For I do know God's patient love perceives, 

Not what we did, but what we tried to do ; 

And though the ripened ears be sadly few, 
He will accept our sheaves." 



V. 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 

Gen. v. 22 : " Enoch walked with God." 

The first part of my text is the most striking 
characterization of a good man's life to be found 
in our Bible ; the last, the most touching record 
of a good man's end. It is said of other men, that 
they followed after God, or walked in the way 
of God ; that this one died full of years, and that 
one satisfied; but it is reserved for this man 
alone to win and hold this great place — to walk 
with God as with a dear friend, voice answering 
to voice, hand touching hand, face reflecting face, 
from the beginning to the end of life ; then, when 
the end comes, Death is shorn of his terrors, cast- 
ing no more shadow on Enoch's spirit than if it 
were the spirit of a yearling child ; the life that 
now is opening into that which i3 to come, as a 
clear twilight opens into day. 

And it is not needful to tell you how blessed 

8R 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 89 

such a life and death must be. I know you will 
agree with me, that no life can be more beauti- 
ful, no end more desirable. The most primitive 
characterization of a good man's life, this is still 
as much as can be said of any man, more than 
any man I have ever known would like to say of 
his own life, or predict of his death. And this 
is notable, because in this light the text is as 
good for what it teaches in doctrine, as for what 
it testifies to life. Because, if I inquire to-day 
after the essential conditions of a perfect walk 
with God, — what I must do to attain eternal life, 
— I am directed, in our common Christian teach- 
ing, to do at least five things : first, to study care- 
fully my Bible ; second, to come to God through 
his Son, Christ Jesus ; third, to join the Christian 
church; fourth, to keep the Sabbath ; and fifth, 
to observe the ordinances, such as the Lord's 
Supper. These are counted essential conditions 
to a perfect walk with God in our time. If I am 
faithful to four of them, I am not considered quite 
so good as if I keep the five. If I say church and 
sacrament are not essential, I am considered still 
more out of the true path. But if I then go on 
to say the Sabbath is not essential, — that a man 



90 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 



may be saved in other ways than by faith in the 
personal and risen Christ, and that the Bible must 
be servant to the soul, not the soul to the Bible, 
— then Christian men tell me I cannot walk with 
God at all, and that my end will be a leap in the 
dark after a life in the dark, with dark" faces all 
about me. 

But I brush the dust away from this most hon- 
orable name, and ask what Enoch had of all this 
that is made so essential to me ; and I find that 
he had no Bible, no knowledge of this personal 
Christ, no church, no Sabbath, and no sacraments; 
which brings me, by a very short and simple way, 
to this great truth ; that all these things, — very 
good, never to be undervalued by any sound- 
hearted man, — are not, after all, essential to the 
perfect life, or else Enoch had not been able to 
attain to this perfection before they were heard 
of; and that under these outward and visible 
signs there must be, therefore, some inward and 
spiritual grace, possessing which at anytime, in 
any land, a man possesses all things — can walk 
with God as Enoch did, and find at the last that 
mortality is swallowed up in life. 

What crumb of proof is needed to show that 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 



91 



Enoch was so destitute, can, of course, only be 
mentioned in the briefest way. That he had no 
Bible is clear, from the fact that if Moses wrote 
the first five books of it, Enoch himself had then 
been translated some two thousand years. 

" After the most careful study of this ques- 
tion, we cannot infer that more than the simple 
weekly division of time was known before Mo- 
ses," says the writer of the article " Sabbath,' 7 
in Smith's great " New Bible Dictionary." 

The claim that the obscure oracle, — that the 
seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's 
head, — must have been a revelation of the Re- 
deemer, it is entirely impossible to believe. That 
Enoch could have belonged to a church, except 
as the church belonged to Enoch, when, 

"-Kneeling down to heaven's eternal King, 
The saint, the father, and the husband prays," 

it is equally impossible to infer; while the time 
was yet very far distant when men should build 
up a stupendous ecclesiastical pretension, from 
the longing of the most loving heart that ever 
beat on this earth, to be remembered by friend 
and follower, even in the simple every-day usage 



92 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 



of eating bread and drinking wine, to be blended 
as intimately with the spirit as these elements 
were with the materialism of their life. And I 
feel ready to apologize for offering even this brief 
hint of the proof, that not one of those things 
now considered so essential had then been heard 
of, until I remember how hard it was for me to re- 
alize once what is now so simple and self-evident; 
and how easy it is to slide into a semi-sense, that 
what is now made of such ponderous importance, 
was always so ; and that we are doing some new 
thing when we establish a church like this, in 
which we declare much that others deem essen- 
tial and supreme, to be but symbolic and subor- 
dinate, while, indeed, we are but backing up to 
the most absolute conservatism ; bringing old 
things into the new time, as if we should sow, 
and reap from the Illinois prairie, wheat grains 
buried for uncounted centuries in some rock- 
tomb by the field. 

I propose to discuss briefly this destitution of 
Enoch then ; this poverty, by which he came so 
directly into the possession of the kingdom of 
heaven; to touch here and there these essen- 
tials of our times, and see how the man might 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 93 

have been richer or poorer for their presence in 
his life, and so 7 by consequence, see what they 
can be, and what they cannot be, to us. 

First of all, Enoch had no Bible ; and yet, sad 
as it seems to be without a Bible, it would 
depend very greatly on the man whether this 
destitution would be a blight or a blessing. I 
love the Bible supremely. In all the world I 
have found no book to set beside it. Other books 
I love well. Milton, Taylor, Carlyle, Tennyson, 
Emerson, Spencer, and many a noble name be- 
side in this great brotherhood are so dear to me, 
that there are few sacrifices I could not gladly 
make rather than lose their companionship. But 
when I am in any great strait - — when I want 
to find words other than my own to rebuke some 
crying sin or to stay some desperate sinner, to 
whisper to the soul at the parting of the worlds, 
or to read, as I sit with them that weep beside 
their dust, words that I know will go to the 
right place as surely as corn dropped into good 
soil on a gleaming May day, — then I put aside 
all books but one — the book out of which my 
mother read to me, and over which she sang 
to me, as far back as I can remember ; and 



94 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 



when I take this book, it is like those springs 
that never give out in the dryest weather/ 
and never freeze in the hardest, because they 
reach so directly into the great, warm fountains 
hidden under the surface. It never fails. 

But have we not all noticed the curious fact, 
that men go to the Bible for what they want to 
find, rather than what they ought to find ? that 
those who profess the most absolute submission 
to its authority, offer generally the finest possible 
illustration of the supremacy of the soul over 
the Bible, in the w T ay they contrive to make it 
serve their turn? and that it is by no means 
impossible to find duplicates of the good Scotch- 
woman's minister, of whom she said, "If there 
is a cross text in the Bible, he is sure to find it, 
and take it for a sermon." 

The truth is, the Bible is like a great pasture, 
into which you turn all manner of feeders. The 
horse takes what he wants, so does the cow ; 
the sheep is true to its instinct, so is the goat : 
and then, last of all, the ass rolls the thistle, like 
a sweet morsel, under his tongue. So, when a 
man with a large, sweet nature, comes to the 
Bible, he crops, by a sure instinct, all the large, 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 95 

sweet passages. The hopeful man finds the hope- 
ful things ; the sad man the sorrowful things ; the 
hard man, the hard things ; and every man the 
things that satisfy his craving, though they may 
in no way make for his peace. If, then, Enoch 
was a right-hearted man, the Bible would have 
been a wonderful blessing to his life. It would 
have whispered consolation in his trouble ; it 
would have rebuked him with a sad sternness for 
his sin ; it would have refreshed him many a 
time in his weariness ; it would have helped him 
to be a man. But if he had been hard, narrow, 
bitter, and bigoted, it might have confirmed him 
in all that is most ugly and unlovable in a man 
otherwise intending to do right, and been com- 
pelled by him, as it has been by so many, into 
antagonism to the purest and best things. Make 
the Bible minister to such a spirit as this; 
find in it merely bard, bitter things, to confirm a 
hard bitter tone towards all but those that hap- 
pen to belong to your own particular Bethel ; 
find nothing to make you tender and kind to the 
good men who may happen to be more radical or 
conservative than yourselves in their interpreta- 
tion of the essentials of the truth and life, then 



96 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 



you are infinitely poorer with a Bible than 
Enoch was without one. 

Because we cannot afford to forget, that this 
man, walking with God ; was by no means so 
destitute- as he seems ; but being a man whose 
soul was open to the heavens, out of which 
whatever is best in our Bible has come, he had in 
some way a Bible after all, — an Old and New 
Testament that was never permitted to grow 
dusty, that was not brought merely for good 
manners where the minister happened to be stay- 
ing over night, but a Bible fresh and perennial, 
beyond what most of us that set such store by 
our Bible can imagine. It is surely no light 
matter in the discussion of this question, to 
remember that this perfect life was all done 
when the world was young ; that this man lived 
while men yet believed angels descended with 
sweet silence on the mountains ; when the things 
which were afterwards put into the book of Job 
and the older Psalms were glistening in the dew 
of the sun newly risen on the race ; when the 
pure wonder and trust of childhood had not gone 
out of men ; when, believing that the morning 
stars sang together, all the sons of God shouted 
for joy. 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 



97 



What Enoch had then, came to him directly. 
If, in any rude runic or hieroglyphic way, he had 
possession of the story of the struggles of his 
race to work out their own salvation, he read his 
Cotton Mather and Winthrop, his Bancroft and 
Hildreth, and Frank Moore, in a near, sacred, 
very present sense of the presence of God in 
the snuggle, that we do not now understand, and 
that we never can understand, until we dare 
believe that, when we want to read in our church 
or family some great lesson from history, these 
annals of our own are so significant that we can 
take a chapter from any one of them, and read 
it with a reverence as deep and all-pervading 
as that we feel when we read in the books of 
Moses, or in the chronicles of the judges and 
kings. 

When" Enoch lived, if his melons were large, 
and sweet, and plentiful, he thanked God for 
good melons. We say, I was very particular 
about seed and soil. If his trees flourished ex- 
ceedingly, they hinted some blessed thing about 
God's good providence to a tree. I remember 
that I sent for the plants all the way to Rochester. 
When Enoch lived, and flowers carpeted dale and 
7 



98 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 



upland on the Euphrates, he thought as the poet 
sang, how 

" Not worlds on worlds in phalanx deep. 

Need we to prove that God is here ; 
The daisy, fresh from Nature's sleep, 

Tells of his hand in lines as clear. 
Eor who but he who arched the skies, 

And poured the day-spring's living flood, 
Wonders, alike in all he tries, 

Could raise the daisy's purple bud, 
Mould its green cup, its wiry stem, 

Its fringed border nicely spin, 
And cut the gold embossed gem, 

That, set in silver, gleams within, 
And fling it unrestrained and free 

O'er hill, and dale, and desert sod, 
That man, where'er he walks, may see 

In all his footsteps there's a God." 

Our children come to us with flowers, but they 
treat us to scientific dissections of them, and 
laugh at the dear old names we give them. We 
are very proud, of course, as becomes the fathers 
of little persons so learned, and say to ourselves, 
" This is very wonderful ! " But then^ we cannot 
but wonder whether they do see quite so much 
in the wild rose or the bluebell as I did when I 
strayed to seek the'm by bank and hedge-row, 
before 1 had heard of such things as Latin and 
botany, or dreamed that somewhere in the pre- 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 99 

existed heavens were voices training to call me 
father. Enoch lived when what sense of sin and 
retribution lay in the soul touched it to the very 
quick ; when dyspepsia and gout were not" to be 
explained away by a pleasant doctor, but meant 
over-feeding and under- work ; when the words we 
sing out of David's psalms, how " the heavens 
declare the glory of God ; and the firmament 
showeth his handiwork," were singing themselves 
in Enoch's heart ; when heaven and earth, and 
life, and the life to come, lay near and next to 
the. soul of the man that walked with God ; when 
every babe born into his house was a chapter in a 
New Testament, teaching some new wonder of 
the truth and life; and what it is to be a child 
of God, was made all clear to him in his own 
children. 

Now,- this Bible was open to Enoch, as it is 
open to every man who will look into it. And 
when we think of this, we cannot wonder that he 
should do so well before teachers of the truth 
had begun to confound the light which lighteth 
every man that cometh into the world, with one 
of its most blessed results ; to make this mighty 
aid to the perfect life and up-springing end, one of 



100 HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 

its most essential conditions ; " to soil the book in 
struggles for the binding ; " to practically deny- 
that in all ages, they that fear God and work 
righteousness are accepted of him, or that the 
invisible things of him from the creation of the 
world are clearly seen, being set forth by the 
things that are made. A voice that always com- 
mands attention, has hinted that the highest faith 
of this soul is to centre finally in the Bible or 
in Mathematics. It is possible ; and yet we may 
remember to-night the high faith of this soul, 
while Bible and probably Mathematics too were 
yet invisible, and then be as sure as we are 
sure God is very God and our Father, that if 
ever Mathematics shall come to assume so great 
a place as to divide the kingdom with this great 
, book, and win souls to trust in them as the very 
truth, then will they somehow become the very 
life too, and the properties and proportions of 
number be so filled with a divine beauty, so 
clothed in robes of light, that men will grow 
brave and strong, and weep and rejoice as they 
study them; will be martyrs and confessors for 
their truth and life, as surely as ever men were 
martyrs and confessors for the truth and life in 
the Prophecies and Gospels, 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 101 

The time which I have given to a special con- 
sideration of this one thing, will release me from 
the discussion of those other so-called essentials 
with any like elaboration. I cannot well tell yon 
what a blessed light has come into my life from 
the face of Jesus Christ since the old times, when, 
one by one, the dark shadows that had always 
fallen between his life aud mine began to lift. 
And I will give place to no man again in true 
love to a true church; to some common home 
where men and women meet who are drawn to- 
gether by a mutual love ; where they can no 
more help meeting than our children can help 
rushing home from school; a sort of divine 
brotherhood, in which every man feels some 
sorrow when trouble falls to any, and a com- 
mon interest in each great joy ; a church so 
true, that if you dishonor one, you dishonor every 
one, and that any man may be sure his good name 
is safe while one is within ear-shot who worships 
in that place ; a church where great reservoirs 
of power are filled full and held ready to be 
poured out whenever the true occasion comes 
to open the flood-gates for God or man, and yet 
where there is such a continual overflow, that 



102 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 



the store is kept sweet by its own generous flow- 
ing ; a church where whatsoever things are true 
are welcome, and where there is such a constant 
deepening of the spiritiTal life manifested in the 
devout utterances of all in prayers and praises, 
that every man is lifted nearer heaven at his 
need than he could hope to be by solitary 
meditation. 

And the Sabbath I love. It may be a super- 
stition; but the more I study the question of 
seven-sameness, the more I am drawn to the Sab- 
bath as a prime necessity of life, apart from its 
special uses for worship, and ready to admit that, 
if it did not take so great a place in the master 
book of the master races on the globe, we should 
still grope our way somehow to the conclusion of 
a great physiologist, that " while the night's rest 
seems to equalize the circulation, still it does not 
restore the perfect balance to the life." Hence 
it will come to pass, that while the man who 
neglects to take a seventh day, at least, for rest, 
may be borne along by the vigor of his mind 
to continual exertion, yet in the long run he will 
break down sooner and more suddenly than the 
man who is determined to put aside at least one 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 103 

seventh of bis working life for rest and recrea- 
tion. But not for this alone will the Christian 
minister stand by the Sabbath, but because he 
knows that the needs of the soul are as impera- 
tive as those of the body, the hunger of the 
inner life as sore as that of the outer, and that 
no man can live by bread alone. 

There is no sight in this world so touching to 
me, as the sight of this church on a Sunday. I 
look down the aisles, and there see the lawyer, 
who has been wrangling in the courts ; the mer- 
chant, who has been watching the fluctuations of 
the market ; the mechanic, every day driven by 
clanging hammer and grinding wheel ; the maid- 
en, weary with the incessant task-work of the 
school ; and the mother, nearly worn out by the 
heavy cares of the home. But here they all 
gather ; and as their faces turn to me, I see no 
longer the busy man and woman, but the soul 
returning to its rest ; coming to God, if haply it 
may feel after him, and find him ; endeavoring to 
shift the burden, so that the pinch will not be 
quite so much on the one place ; striving to find 
how they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their 
strength; and, last of all, while I believe that 



104 HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 

the sacrament of the Lord's Supper has managed 
to drift to the farthest possible point from its 
primitive intention ; to become so thin and shad- 
owy in its material elements, that I almost wish 
these could be dispensed with, as they are so 
nearly ; there is that at the heart of it, when I 
meet with the few who feel that it is to them a 
great consolation, that makes me almost forget I 
am eating a crumb of bread and sipping a drop 
of wine, I can enter so nearly with them into 
that dear Presence, and so realize how wonderful 
was this sacrifice, made in his perfect prime, by 
one who shrank from death in that way, as pos- 
sibly humanity never shrank before, yet would 
make no hair's breadth of compromise to save 
his life, though when the horror of great dark- 
ness fell, he felt that even God had forsaken him. 

But I should fall back on Enoch, and insist 
on using his Bible, and no other, if I were com- 
pelled to choose between that and the thorns 
and thistles so many well-meaning men insist on 
my accepting, whether I will or not, and assimi- 
lating into my nature as the bread of life ; as I 
would shut the book, and never open it again, 
rather than be compelled to acquiesce in the one 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 105 

hideous monstrosity of an eternal hell fire — so, 
if it were possible for me to be beaten out of my 
belief in this dear Christ, as he now looks at me 
out of heaven ; to see in him mainly a sacrifice 
to slake the wrath of an angry God ; or a being 
holding a relation to God that contradicts every 
possibility of nature or numbers ; or even were I 
required to bind myself over to believe what con- 
tradicted the best insight of my own soul concern- 
ing his life, death, and resurrection, whether this 
chorded most nearly with this or that side of lib- 
eral Christianity ; or if I were compelled to join a 
church in which men and women who compose it 
are as much isolated from a common Christian fel- 
lowship as if the cord that should bind them was 
electricity, and they were sitting in pews of 
glass, where not my own honest, natural bent 
was respected, and not the discharge of daily 
duties, in a simple, loving spirit, was counted re- 
ligion, but 1 was compelled to do things against 
my nature, not daring to refuse, in peril of my 
soul; or if I were . compelled to keep a Sabbath 
again, so that I durst not say to any man 
who has been so chained to his desk all the 
week that he has never taken a full breath, 



106 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 



"My friend, I am set to watch for your soul; 
and as a minister of the Gospel of that Christ, 
,who said the first consideration is not the 
Sabbath, but the man, I tell you that this is 
not the true worship for you to come here, 
cramping yourself every Sunday over your Bible 
and hymn-book ; the true worship, the Sabbath- 
keeping most sacred, will be to intersperse with 
your Sundays at church, Sundays when you will 
start out on a long-stretching walk into the coun- 
try, or go lie down, through a summer day, on 
your back at the root of a tree, and look up into 
the great, quiet heavens ; when you will do 
something that will expand. your natural life, and 
sweeten and reform it; that will take the snarl 
out of your brain, instead of letting me put an- 
other into it through my sermon : " if I were 
compelled again to accept the sacrament as a 
sort of occult charm, instead of a sacred remem- 
brance ; to invest it with frightful possibilities of 
damnation if I do not succeed, before I take it, 
of divesting myself of everything that is most 
bright, cheerful, and human — then, rather than be 
bound so to Bible, Intercessor, Church, Sabbath, 
or Sacrament, I would go back and range with 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 



107 



good old Enoch, free, self-contained, subject to 
God alone, as He speaks to me through nature 
and the soul. Then, if any man troubled me 
with impertinences about the soundness of my 
faith, and its power to bear me through life and 
death — if no deeper argument were worth my 
while, I would refer him to this primitive instance 
out of his own prime authority, how one, doing 
by one necessity what I am doing by another, 
won this supreme glor}^ and blessing, — that he 
walked with God, and was translated, so that he 
should not see death. 

All this I say, finally, not because I would 
take one atom of power, and riches, and wisdom, 
and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing 
from these aids to religion, but because I would 
make them everything they can be, as minister- 
ing angels to the soul, and yet be sure that the 
power by which a man shall walk with God pre- 
ceded them, informs them, surpasses them, and 
is so full and free that it overflows all churches, 
books and created beings, as if you should set as 
many vessels in a fountain of living water. It is 
like the sun that fills a cup of every flower in 
your gardens, and yet fills just as full every wild 



108 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 



flower on the boundless prairies : blesses me 
when I bend, worshipping in spirit and in 
truth, on Gerizim or Zion; when I gather my 
children around me as Enoch did, to tell them 
that the great God who made this green valley, 
this shining river and sandy desert, who holds 
those far blue mountains fast on their sunless pil- 
lars, and folds the sparrow to its rest out on the 
slender branch under the stars, — this God is 
their Father and mine : touches me when I meet 
some kindred soul, or walk alone in the shadow 
of great woods, and commune of those ever-fresh 
mysteries of life and the life to come, while the 
birds sing in the branches, and the sun shoots 
down shafts of splendor, or the clouds gather, 
and the thunders shake the great boles, awing 
me into a silence more sacred than our most sa- 
cred speech • or, when I find a man who can say 
words that make me step out more stoutly and 
steadily, who will turn a grave, sweet face of pity 
to me when I stumble, will lift me out of the 
dust when I fall, will lend me a shoulder when I 
am weary, will make me feel that there is at least 
one true soul abroad in the world, walking with 
God, listening to His voice, touching His hand, 



HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 109 

and sure whenever the time shall come for him 
to be taken up ? to reveal some new hint of 
heaven, as he turns his face for a moment ere he 
enters within the portal. 

Now, this is what we are trying to establish 
and maintain, this most primitive and yet most 
perennial faith; to see in these most blessed 
things, not the masters, but the servants of the 
soul ; to hold all questions of Bible, Intercessor, 
Church, Sabbath, and Sacrament as the means of 
grace, but not the end. God is the end of all 
our worship and service ; and we want to build 
this faith into a power massive enough to stand 
impregnable against all the assaults of the devil, 
under every guise ; and may the God that walked 
with Enoch walk with us and help us in this pur- 
pose. 

We want free churches in this free land — 
churches that are strong, yet delicate ; massive, 
but tender ; Christ-like and constant, gracious 
and good. And we want all who are one with 
us in this purpose to join hands and help us. 
Every large, free thinker should stand by such 
freedom ; every believer in God, not as shut up 
in a corner and hemmed in by these fire-bars, 



110 HOW ENOCH WALKED WITH GOD. 

but as in the whole world, with all men for his 
children, should be glad of such a faith; and I 
doubt not but the time is coming when this will 
be the universal religion. We must work for 
that time, give our money for it, our labor, and, 
if need be, our life. 



VI. 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 

Eom. xii. 11 : " Not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, 
serving the Lord." 

Geoege Stephenson was getting ready to go to 
Methodist meeting. He was a young man, just 
at that period in life when young men go to 
Methodist meeting more and more until they are 
brought directly under the influence of the mas- 
ter-spirit of the place, and become in a sense 
religious men. There is not much doubt in my 
mind, as I read this young man's life up to this 
time, that he is in a fair way to that preferment. 
He has that thread of natural piety and goodness in 
his nature that is almost sure to draw him into a 
more intimate relation with the forms and indus- 
tries of the recognized religious life about him, if 
nothing prevent. I said he was getting ready to 
go to the meeting, when a neighbor came to tell 
him he was wanted. He was then running an 

111 



112 THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 

engine at a coal-pit. There was another pit 
between this and his home, which he passed 
every day, that had been flooded with water, so 
that the men were beaten out. The company 
got a steam-pump to clear the pit, and kept it at 
work for twelve months, with no success at all. 
The water, when they had been pumping twelve 
months, was as deep as when they first began to 
pump, and the wives and children were starving 
for bread. 

This young Stephenson had a most active en- 
ergy and fervent spirit towards whatever went by 
steam. The great ambition of his boyhood was 
to run an engine ; and when he rose to that po- 
sition, as he did very soon — for it is a cheering 
fact, that while a man may long for a hundred 
things and not get one, a boy hardly ever fails to 
accomplish his purpose if he has a genuine hun- 
ger to be, or to do, some particular thing, — 
when this boy rose to the position he wanted, he 
treated his engine as if he loved her. Whenever 
there was a holiday and the works were stopped, 
instead of going out with the rest, he studied 
her until she became as familiar to him as his 
own right hand. He was not slothful in busi- 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 113 

ness, and he was fervent in spirit. Intimate 
with the charge that was laid upon him, he soon 
began to perceive why those women and chil- 
dren were starving. The difference between 
what the pump was, and what it ought to be, 
was the difference between a tall, slender, nar- 
row-chested man and a short, sturdy, broad- 
chested man, engaged in digging earth or scoop- 
ing out water. Every pump owner in the coun- 
try-side had tried to mend this pump and failed, 
— because, I suppose, pump-mending and engine- 
running with them was a business and not a 
passion. This young man, with the fervent spirit, 
said one day, as he went past the pit, I can clear 
that pit in a week ; " and they laughed him to 
scorn. But they could not laugh the water Ij 
scorn ; and so at last they sent for him to come 
and try his hand. He went there instead of 
going to the church. He went into the pit on a 
Sunday morning, and worked all that day, and 
until the next Sunday, cleared out all the water 
in a week, and sent the men down to earn their 
children bread. 

From that time the young man comes into no- 
tice. He works through all sorts of opposition, 
8 



114 THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 



and never rests until he has got an engine to 
run fifty miles an hour. He is, more than any- 
other man, entitled to be called the Father of the 
railroad system. He kept the diligent hand and 
fervent heart right on to the end of his life. He 
was a good husband, a good father, a good friend, 
and a good citizen. But it is a curious fact that, 
from the time when he was prevented from going 
to meeting on that Saturday night, he never seems 
to have gone, or to have thought of going again, 
to the end of . his life. He did not turn religious, 
as we say, even when he had nothing else to 
do, but lived a kindly, sunny, or shadowy, faithful 
life, right on to the end, and then died quietly, 
and made no sign. He never said he feared he 
had done wrong in turning from that church to 
that coal-pit, and trying to mend the pump Sun- 
day, instead of keeping the Sabbath day holy by 
doing nothing; indeed, it never seems. to have 
occurred to him to think the matter over in any 
way whatever : his heart was too full, and his 
hand too busy about engines, to find room for the 
idea; to find time, as we should say, to save his 
soul. And so it brings up a question, that to me 
has a good deal of interest, namely : While this 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 115 

man was so busy and so fervent in the way T 
have noted, did he also serve the Lord ? or, from 
the moment he turned aside from the meeting, 
and began to lose that sense and liking for meet- 
ings, and their peculiar services, did he cease to 
serve the Lord altogether, and remaining only 
diligent in business and fervent in spirit, go out 
of this world into darkness and despair ? 

Now, I am well aware what the common answer 
to such a question would be : it would be, " We 
must leave him in the hands of God ; we cannot 
answer the question, because we have no data." 
But that is not true. If he had been an idle 
good-for-nothing, a scampish sharper, an aban- 
doned libertine, an unprincipled truckler, or a 
political vulture ; if he had beaten his wife, 
trained up his child in the way he should go* — 
to state's prison ; if he had been a common nui- 
sance for sixty-nine years and a halfj never going 
into a church except to make a disturbance, 
never keeping the Sabbath except in sensual 
sleep, and six months before his death, or six 
weeks, or six days, had repented of his sin, had 
led a good and pure life, adopted religious ideas 
like those commonly held, and said clearly that 



116 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 



he believed God had pardoned his sins, and 
would take him to heaven, we should feel the 
utmost confidence of that man's safety from that 
date. But we do not feel sure for this other man. 
It is a great mystery, and we must leave him in 
the hands of G-od. But if you push us to the 
fair conclusion of our own standard of religious 
belief, and the books we adopt, we feel compelled 
to say that he has gone to hell. 

Now this looks to me like a tremendous 
piece of injustice on the very face of it. I 
think if a man could be brought face to face with 
the question as I have stated it, and as it really 
stands in the common theological systems ; could 
see these men brought up before what are called 
our Evangelical churches, having never heard 
of these peculiar religious ideas up to that time ; 
could see the men examined, and then observe 
which man was sent upward and which down- 
ward by these standards, his conclusion would 
be, that there was something radically wrong 
in their premises ; and I can well imagine how 
such a man would argue for a new trial. He 
would say, "I know nothing at all about your 
authorities for this curious decision. You tell 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 117 

me that they bear the mint mark of divinity ; 
that they have come to you from the remotest 
antiquity ; from kings, and prophets, and apos- 
tles, and the Son of God himself; that they are 
the fruit of a divine inspiration, foreshadowed in 
prophecies, confirmed by miracles, and held by 
martyrs at the stake." Now all this may be true ; 
but I know something of the laws of this 
Universe, — of what enters into the real life of 
man for blessing and for hurt. I cannot, and 
I will not, deny the claim of this man, who has 
kept the divine law six months out of threescore 
and ten years, to be saved. It is always right to 
do right ; and a man is bound upward from the 
moment when he does begin to do well. When- 
ever that may be, he begins to come out of his 
rags and wretchedness into a wholesome purity 
and happiness. But where you have one reason 
on your authorities for saying that this man is 
good and ascended, because he has done what 
you say for six months out of the threescore 
and ten years of his life, I have six score and 
twenty good reasons for the assurance that this 
other man is also ascended, because he has done 
good according to the organic laws of the world 
ever since he came into it. 



118 THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 

Now, be sure I have not brought up this 
question only to prove that the man I have men- 
tioned for illustration was saved, — though the 
common interpreters of the Christian doctrine 
claim that by their standards it is impossible he 
should be saved, — but to make the man, as he 
represents an idea of very great importance in 
our life, the basis of some discussion of a seg- 
ment, at least, of true religion. 

And I say a segment, because religion in all its 
reaches is as boundless as the Spirit of Gk>d, and 
the infinitely varied life of man can make it, and 
there can be no exhaustive system of religion, in 
the hard, dry sense of the term. Every system 
is a statement, a proposition, a shadow of the 
principles that impress most deeply the man who 
makes it. The Calvinist has not the same idea 
of Free Grace the Arminian has, nor the Arminian 
the same idea of Predestination the Calvinist has. 
The Episcopalian, and Quaker, and Presbyterian 
have no common union except that which comes 
from standing at the angles of a triangle as 
far as possible apart. The men who sprinkle, 
and the men who immerse, and the men who do 
neither, can all show exhaustive reason for their 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 119 

particular methods. And I think the reason for 
all this lies far less in the perverseness of the 
men, than in their powerlessness to see all the 
glory and grandeur of the truth of God that is 
in the world. 

Schools of theology are like schools of paint- 
ing — they are in some measure the copy of a 
copy. They copy from their great master, and he 
copied from God. Walking down the world of 
truth and beauty, the great painter sees things 
that make his soul aflame with their beauty and 
wonder : mountains, meadows, woodlands, rivers, 
men and women, sun and shadow, fill him with a 
sense of their intimate, unutterable divinity. But 
he cannot paint all he sees ; he can paint really 
very little, but he paints what he can — he fol- 
lows the bent of his own genius and inspiration ; 
he brings in here a meadow, and there a wood ) 
here a mountain, and there a river ; here a flower, 
and there a figure ; here a bit of marvellous sun- 
light, and there a wonderful touch of shadow ; 
and makes them all glorious or sombre in the 
coloring of his own soul, and when the picture is 
done, those that love it and follow it, declare 
that it exhausts all perfection. But beautiful 



120 THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 



as it may be, the man has got in but a very 
small piece of the infinite beauty that is all about 
him. And so it is in religious truth : no one sys- 
tem exhausts even the Bible ; how much less the 
boundless wealth of truth, of which the Bible is 
but the part of a record. The system may be a 
good thing for the men who love that method, 
trying faithfully to copy the great original who 
founded the school ; the copyist in the one case 
will hardly need write under his composition, 
" This is a mountain," and " This is a man/' any 
more than in the other he will need to say, " I am 
religious, after the school of Calvin or Luther." 
Still the Bembrandt splendors of Calvin, the 
sober-gray realism of Fox, the water-color land- 
scape of our Baptist brother, the broad Hogarths 
of Wesley, true to exaggeration, the sunny Claude- 
like pictures of Channing, the often stern Salvator 
pieces of Parker, and the rich composition of the 
Episcopal, which in some lights seem to rise to 
the beauty and truth of the best Turners, and 
in other lights to descend to the stage effects 
of Martin, and of which no one seems to be sure 
about the original, or whether there be one — all 
these are true in their way to what the master 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 



121 



saw — a transcript of things that filled his 
soul with keen delight, or holy rapture, or 
awful solemnity. But beyond them, and above 
them, and all about them, were other meadows 
"beautiful as the gardens of the angels upon 
the slopes of Eden, other forests that cover the 
mountains like the shadow of God, other rivers 
that move like his own etornity." 

And so the claim that not one of the sects, nor 
all the sects together, have exhausted the truth, 
brings the claim of this man into court to come 
in for a share, not of salvation only in the life to 
come, but of glory in the best, the most religious 
sense, in the life that now is, though he did take 
such a singular stand. When my friends said to 
me while yet a Methodist preacher, " How can 
you preach for Dr. Furness, in Philadelphia, who 
is a Unitarian ? we should suppose you could 
not find anything to say that these people would 
listen to, and yet be true to your Methodism ; " I 
replied, " I find it easier to preach to them than 
to preach at home ; for I leap over the fence 
that bounds the system of Methodism, and as 
they are already over the fence that has bound- 
ed the system of Unitarianism, we all meet in 



122 THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. . 

the boundless world of truth and beauty which 
God has made outside, and it is wonderful 
how much we find to talk about when we get 
there." 

I think the vital point in the question at issue 
turns on whether, what a man thinks and feels, 
or what he does, is to be considered the essential 
. element in his life. Whether certain ideas, feel- 
ings, and industries in relation to what we agree 
to call religion, are to be counted the great ele- 
ments in the nobility of this life, and the safety 
of the life to come ; or whether to do faithfully, 
with or without them, the one good thing which 
the passionate heart of the man indicates that he 
was created to do, is the true way to live. 

I think also the honest verdict of the human 
heart turns to the deed ; and I picked up a re- 
markable illustration of this, when once I was 
called to a place named Constantine, in Michigan, 
to attend the funeral of a gentleman I had known. 
He was a good man, but he made no profession 
of religion ; never went to church ; kept aloof from 
all sects. He had been for some time in delicate 
health, so that it was dangerous for him to travel 
in bad weather ; when just in the twilight of one 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS, 123 



of the most terrible spring nights, he was sum- 
moned to Lansing, to consult on the impending 
rebellion. His wife tried to keep him home until 
morning ; but he felt he must go. He went, and 
never held his head up after. In my sermon I 
pointed out the organic elements in the life of a 
man ; how holily he may live as a father and hus- 
band and friend; mentioned how my hearers knew 
the record our friend had made, and touched on 
the grandeur of the last deed in which he gave his 
life, and then said, " Is not this religion ?. " I was 
the first man holding this faith openly, who had 
ever spoken there, but it was touching to see 
how readily those men and women caught the 
idea, with what joy they received it, and how 
they thanked me for confirming what had been in 
their hearts as a natural and necessary idea. 

And once after this I visited Camp Douglas, 
and sat down on the cot of a sick man, a prisoner 
from the South. He said, " Are you a minis- 
ter ? " I answered, " Yes." " What sort, Bap- 
tist ? " " No." " Methodist ? » " No." " Pres- 
byterian?" I wanted to see how far he' knew, 
and so still said, " No." I suppose these were all 
he had ever heard about, for he opened his eyes 



124 THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 

wide, when he had exhausted his catalogue, and 
said, " What then ? I answered, " Unitarian." 
" Ah," said he, " I never heard of that before. 
What do they believe ? " • So I told him how they 
believe God is our Father, and cares for us every 
one, and how he takes a man for what he is 
rather than for what he says, and how after death 
he is just as much our Father as he was before. 
" Well," said the man, " I never heard that be- 
fore ; but that's right ; come see me again." I 
went, I think, on the third day, but his cot was 
empty ; he had gone to the Father. 

John Ruskin, in one of his chapters on Modern 
Painters, enters into a discussion of the mean- 
ings of help. He says the clouds may come to- 
gether, but they are no help to each other, and so 
the removal of one part is no injury to the rest, 
but if you take the sap or bark or pith from a 
plant, you do that plant essential injury, for the 
part you take away has taken hold on that power 
we call life, by which all things in the plant help 
each other ; take a part from that power so that 
it cannot help the rest, and it becomes what we 
call dead. Then he says, if you take a limb from 
an animal, it is a far greater injury than to take a 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 125 

limb from a tree, because intensity of life is in- 
tensity of helpfulness ; the more perfect the help 
the more dreadful the loss ; the more intense the 
life the more terrible the corruption, and most 
terrible of all in a man, because his life is the 
most helpful and most intense of all. And so he 
ranges through this great thought until he finds 
that the name, which of all others is most expres- 
sive of the being of G-od, is that of the Helpful 
One, or, in our softer Saxon, the Holy One. 

Now to me, this expresses exactly the idea that 
underlies life. The helpful life is the holy life. 
Holiness is help ; sin is hinderance. At whatever 
point we touch life to help it, in whatever way 
we help the world and do not hinder it, whether 
by our prayers, and songs, and sermons, and in- 
dustry in the church, or by the creation of a 
locomotive, or the construction of a railroad, or 
the painting of a picture, or the writing of a 
book, or the digging of a drain, or the forging 
of a horse-shoe, or the fighting of a battle — in 
whatsoever thing we do, if we really help and 
do not hinder, then that is a holy life. And in 
whatever way we hinder the world, and stand in 
the way of its life, its healthy, hearty growth, by 



126 THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 

doing what will hurt or hinder men in the largest 
sense, then that, being the reverse of helpful, is 
a sinful life. The first principles of sin and 
holiness reach back into all creeds and churches 
so far as they stand true to life, and no more ; 
and the ultimate touchstone of holiness is the 
organic law by which the best interests of the 
whole man can be secured in his relation to the 
whole world, and all the men that are in it. 

And there is a beautiful illustration of this 
principle in two related incidents in the life of 
Christ. When he sat down weary at the well, 
the Samaritan woman came to fill her pitcher, and 
entering into conversation with him, found that 
she had got hold of a preacher or prophet, and 
thinking to get a solution of the old vexed ques- 
tion, as to which was the true religion, Samaritan 
or Jew, said, " Our fathers worshipped . in this 
mountain, and ye say that in Jerusalem men 
ought to worship. 7 ' He replied, " Ye worship ye 
know not what ; we know what we worship, for 
salvation is of the Jews." But when he heard 
the story, or saw in some inward way, how a man 
went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell 
among thieves, who stripped him and wounded 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 127 

him and left him for dead, and how two Jews, a 
priest and a Levite, men who stood first among 
the Jews in the relation of true church worship, 
— if praying and singing be true worship, — when 
he saw .them go over to the other side, and leave 
the helpless man to his fate, and saw one of those 
Samaritans come along, who did not know what 
they worshipped, saw him leap from his horse in 
a great flood of pity and mercy, hold up the poor 
fellow's head, stanch his wounds, set him on his 
own beast and trudge along on foot himself, as if 
there was not a robber within a thousand miles, 
carry him to a tavern, and not throw him on 
the county when he got there, buf pledge him- 
self to pay all the expenses, and then walk away 
as if he had done one of the most common things 
in the world, — the great soul saw past the old 
dogma, into this fresh organic law, this universal 
principle of worship, this holiness of helpfulness, 
and his soul clave to the soul of the Samaritan 
who knew not God." 

And be sure this principle underlies every 
other principle whatever in the religious life. 
I can teach God really just so far as I am 
good. Christ will be divine greatly by my di- 



128 THE HOLINESS OP HELPFULNESS. 

vinity. I am my own proof, before letters, of the 
intrinsic worth of human nature. I shall not 
have much trouble in proving to a man God 
is our Father, if I can prove to him 1 am his 
brother. That volume of the Evidences of Chris- 
tianity which the other side never did answer, 
and never will, is a book written on what the 
apostle calls the fleshly tables of the heart. 

And this is the grand use of churches, 
systems, sacraments, and ceremonies. They 
reach back into the principle of helpfulness 
to find their seal ; they are centres of help to 
the world, and to the man, or they are noth- 
ing. I care not one pin for their age, evidences, 
liturgies, theologies. If the church that holds 
them and holds you, cannot help you, do not go 
to it. If it does help you, do not dare to stay 
away, when you need help ; and that, I take it, 
with most of us, is pretty much all the time. If 
your church does not help others, let it perish. 
If it does, care for it as you care for every noble 
and helpful thing : nay, care for it as the noblest. 
If the liberal Christian preacher here, or any- 
where, cannot help you in your most central and 
sacred life, and the Catholic bishop can, then- I 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 129 

charge you, on your allegiance to God and your 
own soul, go to the bishop by the shortest route ; 
but if we do help you, if our words and deeds 
touch some spring, that is to all the rest of your 
manhood what the mainspring is to a watch, if 
we help you to a clearer vision and a deeper 
trust, to a fairer hope and a more abundant help- 
fulness, then we take hold on first things ; we 
stand to you in the old apostolic relation ; we 
carry the keys, the bishop does not ; and every 
such man is the rock on which the Master will 
build his church, and the gates of hell shall not 
prevail against it. 

Here, then, was the great use of the man I 
have noted for illustration — his place in the 
world was not in the church, but in the foundery 
— he was not the heart, but the hand in the body 
of Christ ; but he was the hand, and his mission 
was to be strong, diligent, faithful, true to his 
trust, and let all the rest take care of itself. God 
raised him up to inaugurate railroads ; woe to him 
if he does not do that. He will endanger his 
soul if he neglects that. His place on that Sun- 
day was in the coal-pit ; woe to him if the Master 
comes and finds him in the Methodist meeting. 
9 



130 THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 

The great problem for him to solve is, not whether 
he is going to be happy in meeting, or happy on 
his death-bed, or happy at all on this earth, but if 
he is going to be helpful in the one supreme way 
in which God has made him to be helpful. If he 
cannot be a true husband, and father, and friend, 
and man, and machine-maker, except he belong to 
the church, then at his peril he fails to join one. 
If the church and its religious ideas, emotions, 
and inspiration are needed to make him a good 
man, if he is not brave, faithful, strong, and lov- 
ing, and the church can aid him to be all that, as I 
believe it can, then he must seek the church ; but 
if all that is in him, then God is in him to will and 
to do of His good pleasure, and when he carries 
that locomotive up to the throne, God will say, 
" Well done." 

There can be no more striking and conclusive 
proof of where the claim ought to rest for the 
intrinsic worth of that, for the lack of which 
most religious teachers are conscientiously com- 
pelled to send such men as Stephenson -to the 
pit, than to notice the way in which the war tried 
them, as by fire. It is a most striking study. 
From 1857 to 1861 the whole land went under 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 131 

a great tide of revival. From Chicago, our Young 
Men's Christian Association went to New Orleans, 
joined there in prayers and praises. It was but 
one instance in a thousand. The entire religious 
world was one. But when the South seceded, 
the church seceded with the state, and then 
came the wonder. These men held precisely the 
same religious beliefs and dogmas, uttered the 
same prayers and received the same sacraments 
. as they had always done ; and they found that 
those things would work as solidly to inspire 
treason as truth. " When Massa Jackson pray 
all night," his body servant said, " den I pack his 
tings ; I know he go on a raid." Our great dead 
friend, our father Abraham, noticed this in our 
darkest days, and said, the rebels prayed a great 
deal, and to all appearances, with the best results. 
So can "the wine the Samaritan takes to restore 
the dying man on the road to Jericho, madden 
the robber to murder them both. It is only in 
being true and right, in being on the side of 
truth, and justice, and humanity, only in reach- 
ing back into first things and being a helper 
there, that then God will be true, and every man 
godlike, whose life is of that noble grain. 



132 THE HOLTNESS OF HELPFULNESS. 



And so ideas, emotions, creeds, meetings, sac- 
raments, and ceremonies are all good as they do 
good : but they are as passive as the powder 
which, for ought I know, came out of the one 
cask to slay our father Abraham, and the 
wretched murderer by whose hand he fell. It 
is a weighty thing to me, that Christ makes 
those men, to whom he tells us he will say, 
" Come ye blessed," entirely unconscious that 
the things they had done were in any particular 
way religious. To be sure they had visited 
prisons, fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and 
tended the sick ; but then what religion was 
there about that any more than in the Samaritan's 
saving the life of that dying Jew ? That was 
merely humanity, helpfulness, morality. But the 
prayers the man said when he got back to Mount 
Gerizim, the purifications and praises he went 
through there, these were his religion. I have 
no doubt that they did help him, that they in- 
spired him, and kept his heart fresh to do just so 
next time. But the thing he did, and not the 
belief he held, or the prayers he said, or the day 
he observed — the thing he did was his religion ; 
the helpfulness of the man was his holiness, as it 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 133 



will be to those to whom Christ will say, " Well 
done ; " while on the other side, those to whom 
he will say, " Depart ye cursed," are the men 
who will cry, " Did we not teach in thy name, 
and cast out devils, and work wonders?" But 
he will say, " Depart ; I never knew you. You 
preached and did wonders, but you did not 
help." And so entirely does this helpfulness 
make our holiness, that the same deep and strong 
principle is made to reach across the worlds, and 
in the life to come, to give the faithful helper 
more power to help, as the best gift of God in 
heaven. The poet sings of a noble man dead, — ■ 

" How can we doubt that for one so true 
There must be other nobler work to do?" 

The Lord says, " Well done ; thou hast been 
ruler over ten pounds, I will make thee ruler 
over ten cities." 

And so I would affirm and rejoice in a church 
broad enough to take into full membership and 
full communion all those men who may never 
come inside the church doors, who never do a 
hand's turn at church work, who know nothing 
of our belief or practices, but whose whole heart, 
and soul, and mind, and strength, are devoted to 



134 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 



some piece of helpfulness that shall lift this dark 
world into the sun ; — wherever that man may be 
working the part of him that sent him, whether 
at the anvil, like my own father, or at the foot 
of Missionary Ridge, charging up hill like my 
adopted son, or resting for a moment to watch 
the mimic life on the stage with Abraham Lin- 
coln ; let the Angel of Death come ever so sud- 
denly, cast over them his white robe and whis- 
per peace, that place in which he finds them is 
the very nearest point to heaven ; and the first 
word that greets them is the glad " Well done." 
And I would have all such true and faithful men 
know this ; would fain say to them, " This that you 
are doing is work for God ; you may be a saint 
of God in the place where you stand." 

Friends, a mere feeling may fail you, but a 
helpful spirit never can, because that is a holy 
spirit. The ready hand and the fervent heart, if 
the one work and the other beat for good, is sure 
to be right. You mothers may be occupied with 
work for your children in the house, until you 
have no time for what you call religion ; you 
men may not know which way to turn in con- 
sequence of business in the office, and you may 



THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 135 



wonder whether so much to do in this world is 
safe for the next; you may long for the forms 
and feelings that are counted of such importance 
in many churches. Now do not misunderstand 
me : if they would help you to be more helpful, 
you cannot get too many. But if they stand 
instead of your helpfulness, so that in feeling 
happy you think you are religious, and are not 
helpful, they are dangerous, and they may come 
to be deadly. 

You may die, as this man did, at the close of a 
long, faithful, helpful life, and give no sign ; and 
yet no understanding soul will doubt that, for one 
so true there must be other nobler work to do ; 
or you may die, with a testimony shining like 
burnished gold, at the end of a life in which you 
did not even drive away the dogs from the 
beggar" at your gate, but you will wake up in 
the torment of an unsatisfied soul, and go into 
the hell of lost opportunities. 

And if you say, " I am hedged about, I can do 
nothing ; I fain would help, but I cannot," — your 
very longing is help. " They also serve who only 
stand and wait." It is never true that we are not 
helpers ; where the fervent heart is, there is the 



136 THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS. 



servant of God ; and unto him comes ever with 
the work the reward. He is still and strong in 
God, because he is a co-worker with God 7 and his 
life holds for itself a secret which is not known 
to another — he has come in his very work to 
the rest that remaineth. 

u Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase) 
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace, 
And saw within the shadow of his room, 
Making it rich, like a lily in bloom, 
An angel writing in a book of gold. 
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold, 
And to the presence in the room he said, 
' What writest thou? ' The vision raised its head, 
And with a look made of all sweet accord, 
Answered, ' The names of those who love the Lord ! ' 
' And is mine one? ' asked Abou. ' Nay, not so, : 
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low, 
But cheerly still, and said, ' I pray thee, then, 
Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.' 
The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night 
He came again with great awakening light, 
And showed the names whom love of God had blest; 
And, lo, Ben Adhem's name led all the rest I " 



VII. 



GASHMTJ. 

Neh. vi. 6 : "It is reported among the heathen, and Gashmu 
saith it." 

My text centres in some human interests that 
were painfully real twenty-two hundred years 
ago ; and I propose, first, to tell you those parts 
of the story that especially touch the text, and 
second, to note for you how the text again 
touches our life and time. 

Nehemiah was cup-bearer to an old Persian 
king. The position was one of great trust. He 
was a Jew, a prince of the old line, whose father 
had preferred Persia to Palestine, and remained 
there when a great many of his countrymen 
went out of the captivity to the fatherland. It 
is no matter what his reasons were for settling, 
but I suppose he never quite forgot "the old 
country, — no man ever does, — and contrived to 
transmit the love to his son, who one day hap- 

137 



138 



GASHMU. 



pened on some Jews, fresh from Jerusalem, who 
told him that the people there were in very 
great distress ; the whole province was in afflic- 
tion ; the walls of the city broken down, the gates 
burned with fire ; and he tells us when he 
heard these things he sat down and wept and 
mourned, and besought God to help him get 
things righted. Then he determined to appeal 
to the king, but had to wait four months for the 
right moment. One day he had to give the king 
wine ; he was very much troubled : the king saw 
by his face that he was sad, and said, " Why art 
thou sad ? thou art not sick ; this must be some 
heart sorrow.'- Then he said, " 0 king, why 
should I not be sad, when the city, the place of 
the graves of my fathers, lieth waste, and the 
gates are burned with fire." Then the king said, 
" What is thy request?" And I said unto the 
king, " Send me to the city of my fathers' sepul- 
chres, that I may build it." So the king said, 
" How long wilt thou be gone ? " And I set a 
time ; and the king sent me away, and gave me 
letters to the governor to pass me on to Judah, 
and a letter to the chief forester, bidding him 
give me all the timber I wanted. 



GASHMU. 



139 



The good patriot in good time got to Jerusa- 
lem, and found about the place a party with 
some power, not only content to see this ruin, 
but determined to cry down reform ; and it 
grieved them exceedingly that there was come 
a man to seek the welfare of the children of 
Israel. There is then a touching picture of 
three days silence, in which, no doubt, he pon- 
dered what had best be done. Then he rose 
up in the night, and with one horse and a few 
men made a secret survey of the ground, from 
the valley gate to the dragon well, from the 
dragon well to the fountain gate ; then to the 
king's pool, where the ruin was so bad his horse 
could not get along at all. Then he went in the 
night by the brook, and viewed the wall, and 
turned back and entered the gate of the valley, 
and so returned ; telling neither priests, nor 
rulers, nor nobles what he had done. And then, 
when all was ready, he said, " See, now, what 
distress we are in ! let us build up the walls of 
Jerusalem, and take away the reproach." And 
I told them how the hand of God was upon me, 
and told them the king's words. Then they all 
said, " Let us rise up and build." So one party 



140 



GASHMU. 



built to the sheep gate, and another to the fish 
gate, and one to the old gate, and one to the 
palace gate, and one to the valley gate, and one 
to' the fountain gate, and one to the sepulchres, 
and one to the armory, and one to the horse 
gate. And the goldsmiths did a piece, and the 
apothecaries a piece, and the ministers a piece ; 
and one man, whose children have spread over 
all the earth, repaired a little piece that stood 
just opposite his own chamber ; and one family, 
whose children are not all lost, thank God, built 
a thousand cubits. So, on the twenty-fifth day 
of the month Elul, early in our September, fifty- 
two days from the time they began, walls and 
gates and locks and bars were all done. 

But if this earnest, silent man had done no 
more than simply build the walls of his native 
city, I should not select him from ten thousand 
who have clone as well or better. The real 
thing is, with him as it is with all of us, what he 
built with the wall ; what he went through to 
build it ; what the devil, in different forms, did 
to stop him. and how he kept on finding new 
sources of power for the exigencies of the time, 
holding fast steadily to God until his work was 



GASHMTJ. 



141 



done. That is the jewel in this setting of the 
Scriptures that brings the man and his lesson 
near to you and me. 

Three men especially in the community, were 
determined to oppose all attempts at renovation. 
They said it was rank rebellion against the 
king. They cried out, u What are these feeble 
Jews doing? Will they fortify themselves? 
Will they right things in a day ? Will they cre- 
ate good stones out of burnt rubbish? Why, 
if a fox go up, he will break down their wall. 
If they go to do this work, rather than let them, 
we will surprise and kill them." But this man 
said, " The God of heaven will prosper us, and 
so we will build." And the people had a mind 
to work. So they prayed to God, and set a 
watch ; and he said, " Do not be afraid, but 
fight for your homes, and brothers, and sons, 
and wives, and daughters." So some builded the 
wall, and some held the spears and shields ; and 
every builder had a sword girded on his side, 
and he says, " I set men to blow the trumpet, 
so that wherever the trumpet sounded, the peo- 
ple should be ready to fight." So we builded 
and were ready to fight, and from the time when 



142 



GASHMTJ. 



we began until we ended, from morning to star- 
light, and from starlight to morning, we were 
working and watching, and not one of us put 
off our garments except for the washing. 

Then, when the wall was builcled in the face 
of this enmity, when there was no hope for force, 
they tried fraud. They sent four times to ask 
this great worker to come into council, and four 
times he replied, " I am doing a great work, so 
that I cannot come down ; why should the work 
cease, while 1 leave it, and come to you ? " Then 
one of them sent his servant, with an open letter 
in his hand, in which was written, " It is re- 
ported among the heathen, and Gashmu saith 
it, that thou art intending to rebel, and hast 
built the wall so that thou mayest be a king, 
and hast set preachers in Jerusalem to proclaim 
thee king. Now, we will report all this to the 
court. Come, if thou wilt not confer with us, 
and let us take counsel." Then he says, I sent 
to them, saying, " There is no such thing done. 
Ye are making it out of your own heart, to 
stop the good work." Finally, a man came, as 
he claimed, from the Lord, and said, " Go into 
the temple, and shut thyself in to save thy life, 



GASHMU. 



143 



for they mean to kill thee in the night.' 7 But I 
said, " Shall such a man as I flee into the tem- 
ple to save my life? Where is the man that 
would do that ? I will not go in." And when 
I had said that, I saw the Lord had not sent 
him. So the wall was finished. My text then 
touches, as you see, one of the most trying sorts 
of hinderance that every man must face and 
conquer, who determines to do anything ahead 
of the littleness and unfaithfulness of the time. 
And now I will note, — 

I. Who Gashrou was. 

II. What he tried to do ; and, 

III. What came of it. 

I. Personally, we do not know Gashmu from 
the ten thousand men of his era. He was Gash- 
mu the Arabian, and that is all. 

But his real identity is not centred on the 
year of his birth, or who was his father, or how 
much he was worth, but on what he did. When 
our life begins, our name is almost everything ; 
but when our life is ended, it has been heavily 
freighted with good or evil, and is what the 
things are to which it gives personal identity. 
This man's house has crumbled into ruin. His 



144 



GASHMU. 



father, his birthday, and his money at interest 
have all gone into a night, for which there is no 
morning. The woman that loved him, the chil- 
dren that were born to him, the men that fought 
him or flattered him, have not left even a shadow 
on the face of the earth. What church he went 
to, what creed he held to, what book was most 
sacred to him, what ideas in politics, or morals, 
or religion, were final and unquestionable — 
these things have all gone, and left no more 
trace of the man than the particular flowers he 
tended under that September sun. But he did 
one solid thing ; he came out square against a 
man who was determined to do good, and was 
earnestly doing it, and tried to put him down. 
Gashmu, I suppose, was a man whose word went 
a good way in that little corner of the world ; a 
man worth referring to when you wanted to 
make a thing go. If he said it was so, there was 
no more to be said. A man who had paid his way, 
and kept a good name, and never disturbed his 
neighborhood with visionary projects, and never, 
up to that time, let them see that he was igno- 
rant, or stupid, or shallow. Perhaps he did not 
even know it himself; or, it may be, that he 



GA8HMU. 



145 



was not stupicL but only selfish, or a bigot, and 
here was the fire to the dry wood that had been 
piled ready ; here the one reason why he should 
cry, " Lead us not into temptation ; " here the sin 
that so easily beat him. 

He might have satisfied himself in half an 
hour that this man was all right ; half an hour's 
talk would have convinced him that Nehemiah 
was an estimable, truthful, and unselfish man as 
ever lived. Gashmu was probably on the wrong 
side at the start, and was too proud to acknowl- 
edge it ; or he did not like Nehemiah the first 
time he saw him ; or had lived so long beside the 
ruins that he had come to admire them more 
than sound walls ; — how can I tell you what were 
the motive powers that pushed him on to sin, 
when I see all these reasons, and a score of 
others, ' actuating the Gashmu s of to-day. A 
motive power there must have been, but that 
is lost with all that he had or was. This only, 
this one thing is left : A good man was doing a 
good work with all his might, and bad men tried 
to hinder him. They tried to hurt his person. 
Gashmu was above that. He was none of your 
common rowdies. Sanballat and Tobiah might 
10 



146 



GASHMU. 



do that, but not Gashmu ; yet Gashmu will sit 
there and muse his dislike, and be glad to hear 
the petty stories that float like thistle-down 
through the neighborhood against the innocent 
man ; words are twisted and turned to meanings 
Nehemiah never thought of, and Gashmu hopes 
they are true ; he wishes they were true ; the 
wish is the father to the thought, and he believes 
them. One story, in particular, gets credence. 
This man means to be a king. I suppose at first 
it was only, " I wonder if he does not mean to be 
a king." Then " I guess he does mean to be a 
king." Gashmu hears the floating absurdity. On 
any other subject he would pronounce anything 
so empty as this rumor silly ; but when this man 
is the subject of the rumor, he would rather 
believe it than not. He will go over the first 
thing to-morrow and take a look at things, not at 
the man, but at the walls. Then the whole bad 
nature of him is stirred to its uttermost deep. 

There can be no reason short of rebellion to ' 
justify such a work as that ; he has no doubt in 
his own mind now about the rebellion ; he re- 
members twenty instances in which men have 
prepared for rebellion in exactly the same way ; 



GASHMU. 



147 



this man certainly means to rebel. But so far 
G-ashmu is free from the last penalty ; he can go 
home and be silent, and he will be saved from 
the shame of all the ages. No, he cannot do 
that, for as he goes home, ready ears listen, and 
the fatal word is uttered in his vexation, " That 
man certainly means to be a king • " and he can 
never get that word back again, though he weep 
tears of blood for it. Before night it is repeated 
by twenty tongues, " He intends to rebel : Gashmu 
says it." So Gashmu has permitted his prejudices 
to grow into a lie. Gashmu is to live thousands 
of years for one purely false assertion, and to be 
the representative man of unprincipled gossips 
and narrow bigots as long as the world stands. 

He cannot kill the shame ; no ! nor by living 
can he live it down. The days have grown to 
weeks," the weeks to months, the months to years, 
the years to ages, and that is still a sad name, 
branded with a lie. " It is commonly reported, 
and Gashmu said it." Note now, I pray you, 
some Gashmus in our churches, and our social 
and national life. First of all, there are Gashmus 
in the church, and Gashmu said it, is at the 
bottom of nine tenths of all the differences in 
Christendom. 



148 



GASHMU. 



I suppose that men will forever prefer this or 
that form of religion, as the Switzer prefers a 
mountain and the Hollander a flat. They were 
born to it. The first Switzer had the prefer- 
ence for mountains strong in his nature, and it 
has rooted itself deeper into every new age. So 
it is in the things which are, as it were, outside 
vital religion in all churches. The Hollander can 
live in Switzerland, and the Switzer in Holland, 
but not so well or so happily it may be ; still, 
the fact that they can live a stout life when they 
change places, is conclusivo on the vital life there 
is in both countries for both men. So it is in 
churches. 

Some men like their religion, as the eagle likes 
his nest, on a bare crag above the reach of the 
fowler, commanding great sweeps of country and 
utterly alone ; and some, like the lark, will soar 
while they sing, but build a nest on the sward 
with all common and lowly things that stay on 
the earth ; and if we could ever grow so large- 
hearted as to recognize this spiritual conforma- 
tion, it would trouble us no more to see a good 
man in the church of Rome than it troubles the 
eagle to see the lark. It would be as natural and 
beautiful for us to see men in the Presbyterian 



GASHMU. 



149 



church, or in the Episcopalian, as it is to see one 
bird build in a thorn bush, another in an apple 
tree, and a third in a three century pine, or to 
see a Switzer at Berne, and a Hollander in Rotter- 
dam. But it is notorious that this is not so. If 
you push the good Baptist brother to the last 
result of his creed, you are pretty sure to find 
that he can only give you the choice of very cold 
water, or something exactly at the other point of 
the diameter. The Unitarian can be logical, only 
in showing that Trinitarians are idolaters. Then 
we are as far apart as Mount Gerizim and Mount 
Zion were in the old time. The Jews had no 
dealings with the Samaritans ; the Episcopalians 
have none with the Presbyterians, and if the 
members of both were not far better than the 
set Gashmuisms of their churches, they would 
be obliged to count the pastors of the Unitarian 
churches very wicked men. 

Now, who is accountable for all this ? Gashmu. 
It is commonly reported, and Gashmu said it. 
These men and women have natures as tolerant 
as Hollander and Switzer to swamp and moun- 
tain. They love each other heartily, and will 
laugh or weep for the same gladness or gloom. 



150 



GASHMU. 



They will stand at the same death-bed, and look 
upward in the same conviction that heaven lies 
above us, and pass round the same little child 
with the same original and beautiful untruthful- 
ness about its perfect beauty and parental re- 
semblance, and as long as they keep the good 
sweet nature, be interested alike in all these 
wonderful revelations to youth and maiden, which 
are just as fresh while the world grows older, 
as was the first snow-drop in Eden. But watch 
us when we come near the confines of creeds ; 
just as we grow tolerant here, we are counted 
out as backsliders ; let us be large-hearted here, 
and we become suspected. Who has sundered 
us ? Gashmu. Away back in the old time, a man 
came, no matter whether he belonged to this 
church or that, saw the walls of Zion broken 
down and in ruins, was smitten to the heart, won 
men over to help him, turned to with all his 
might and began to repair the waste places, but 
Gashmu, who had got to consider the ruin just 
about what he wanted, got a grain of bitterness 
into his soul, — 

" One little pitted speck in garnered fruit, 
Which, rotting inward, slowly moulders all." 



GASHMU. 



151 



And there was uncertainty and trouble all about. 
The men who had lived there all their life, and 
were contented with the ruin, could not tell what 
this renovation meant. Then reports got about 
of designs upon the authority of the king ; but it 
was Gashmu who made the mischief a finality. 
He was the man who knew most ; the man the 
rest trusted to find out what these men were 
about. He did not go to the reformer and ask to 
see his charter. He took counsel with his own 
prejudice and preference, and made that his foun- 
dation, and said, This is rebellion, without the 
shadow of a doubt, and he is the man who made 
the gap. Gashmu said it, and we believe Gashmu 
rather than the holiest whispers of our own na- 
tures, and stand apart in that which, above all 
things, should bring us together. We say it is all 
wrong for the Switzer to prefer the mountain, or 
the Hollander the marsh, or the eagle the cliff, 
or the skylark the sod ; " we distort our nature 
ever for our work, and count our right hands 
stronger for being hoofs." We forget that, 

" When all is tried, all done, all counted here, 
All creeds, sects, churches, all philosophies, 
That Love just puts his hand out in a dream, 
And straight outreaches all things." 



152 



GASHMU. 



In the churches, no doubt, we should all be 
nearer and sweeter in Christian intercourse but 
for this Gashrnu, who goes about blinking here 
and there at other sects, and asserting that what 
may be so, is so ; and Gashrnu said it, seals many 
an opening fountain of sweet Christian refresh- 
ing, fastens ingenuous young souls into a rigid 
intolerance, and builds fences between Chris- 
tian men so high, that it is hopeless trying to 
get over. 

So again in our social life, Gashrnu is the curb- 
stone where all the mischief is finally unloaded. 
Little rumors of no moment, the tiny sparks 
that are struck off in the quick, hearty friction 
of the daily life, need Gashrnu to blow them into 
smoke and fire. Alone, they would die out the 
moment they were struck, but when they strike 
Gashrnu, there is no dying. If it is commonly 
reported, and Gashrnu said it, it takes a strong 
decision to say, the moment we hear it, " That's 
a lie." Your social Gashrnu means well on his 
own estimate of things, too ; his main faults are 
narrowness- and hastiness, and a strong tendency 
to measure all men by his own personal standard. 
Perhaps he is, on the whole, a good man ; lives 



GASHMU. 1^3 

a life that wins the respect of a whole town ; tells 
the truth so constantly that his word is as good 
as gold. But some one man does not train with 
him ; he does not like that man at all ; does not 
understand him; and so cultivates a little feeling 
of dislike, until it bulges into a receptiveness of 
idle rumors, that would be like mere straws if 
they were reported of a man he loves. Yet he 
will nurse them, and cherish them, and at some 
moment his dislike will come to a head, and he 
will say, "I have no doubt it is true." Then 
Gashmu said it, clips that man's margin at the 
bank, draws the sunshine out of half the faces 
he meets on the street, and puts him in a 
position that, it may be, brings the very tenden- 
cies for which Gashmu has spotted him ; for, 
"being observed where observation is not sym- 
pathy", is just being tortured." How many grown 
men and women regret bitterly to-day some 
such misjudgment on another, — the hasty word 
of a single moment, that we could never recall 
and never atone for, by which the life of the 
man or woman about whom we said it has been 
darkened and injured past redemption. It was 
a small matter of itself, but Gashmu said it, and 



154 



GASHMU. 



that was like sowing the thing in black prairie 
loani, insuring to us a harvest of bitter regrets, 
and to our victim a harvest of bitter memories. 

Then we. have Gashmus in the nation and the 
public life; and Gashmu said it, is the most cer- 
tain seven-barrelled Springfield repeater that the 
devil has in his whole armory. But I warn you 
here against believing that this Gashmu of the 
old heathen world is only to be found on the one 
side. It is impossible to study the course of 
public life, and not conclude that he is on all 
sides of all public questions, and is about as 
mischievous on one side as another. Gashmu is 
never the man that looks into things, and then 
takes his side and stands to it for conscience* 
sake ; but the man who speaks out of his narrow 
heart and mind the lie he wants to be true, and 
wants others to believe. I suppose, while there 
is a free and healthy government in this or any 
other country, there will be conservatism and 
radicalism ; a party that will hold on, as long as it 
can, to things as they are, and a party that will 
want to go ahead and reform them. And, stand- 
ing as I have always done, from pure choice, with 
radicals, I would still try to see the good there 



GASHMU. 



155 



is in conservatism, and to respect men who stand 
by this conviction, pleading that we shall not 
pull down the old house, however rickety and 
inconvenient it may be, before we are able to 
build a new one. Let the conservative stand 
up for time-honored, and by that I never mean 
time-execrated, institutions and charters, and he 
deserves as well of his country as any other man 
who will make sacrifices for her, and defend and 
help her to the best of his power. 

But in doing this on any side, one great trouble 
still is Gashmu. 1 will venture to say there is 
not a faithful man in politics to-day who has only 
the good of the nation at heart, and so will only 
go with his party when his party is right, who is 
not constantly tormented by Gashmu. One day 
he will slide a paragraph into a letter from the 
Capitol, another day he will put a barbed arrow 
into the shape of a local. Then you shall find 
him lurking in a leader, or in a speech in Con- 
gress. Gashmu in the nation breaks out every- 
where, and if God did not intend to save us as a 
nation with a great salvation, to make our walls 
strong and sure in spite of him, and all that go 
in his company, Gashmu would be our ruin. 



156 



GASHMU. 



Now for all this there is the concluding ad- 
monition and encouragement. And this, first of 
all, is clear: with all his power and prestige, 
Gashmu came to nothing before this earnest 
steady builder of waste places, and found that 
Gashmu said it, was no more avail to stop the 
building, than a pewter spoon would have been 
to carry it on. It was common rumor and 
Gashmu on the one side, and God and the right 
on the other ; and, alas for Gashmu, when he is 
found fighting against God ! 

And so I would say to every earnest man and 
woman, keep true to your task, whatever it be, 
make your work as good as you can, put all you 
have into it, stand steadily by it, and never mind 
Gashmu. He may annoy you, he cannot hurt 
you; he may hinder you, he cannot stop you. 
It is no matter what you may be doing, — if you 
are faithfully at work, trying to do good, there 
will be a Gashmu somewhere, who will say what 
he can against you. All you can do, and all you 
have to do, is to work on silently, and trust to 
God, and never mind Gashmu. . 

Secondly, when Gashmu comes, and begins to 
say this and that to annoy you, do not come down 



GASHMU. 



157 



to talk to him. If lie wants to revile you, let 
him; the day will be sure to declare which is 
right. Common report may say wheat is- chaff, 
and Gashmu may confirm it, as he did about this 
honest Hebrew. But when the wheat is once 
cast into the ground, and the kindly earth folds 
it to her breast, and the sweet rains drop down 
from heaven upon it, and the sun wakens all the 
pulses of the summer about it, then you will see, 
" first the blade, then the ear, and after that the 
full corn," and God will be true and Gashmu a 
liar. 

Then, if you come across Gashmu in the church, 
or in society, or in any way whatever, keep out 
of his way as much as you can — have nothing to 
say to him. There are plenty of men and women, 
wherever you go, who will be glad to meet you 
and tell the truth, and let other people alone; 
who will respect your nature in religion, and 
your character in life, and will never think to do 
the truth good service by a lie ; who will say to 
you, the church in which you can get and do 
the most good, is the best church, whatever be 
its name. No church can satisfy all. Gashmu 
has no more right to interfere with the church 



158 



GASHMU. 



you shall go to than he has to interfere with the 
state you shall go to. And I venture to say that 
when ♦ this is once accepted generally, in the 
church and out of it, Gashmu will be voted a 
nuisance, and put down. 

Then let us take care that we are not as Gash- 
mu. It is one of the most subtle and dangerous 
sins I know of. I do not know of any profession 
that is not guilty. Gashmus among ministers, 
merchants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, and 
men generally, and women, too, are plenty as 
blackberries. I have seen him in all sorts of so- 
cial parties. I have even imagined I detected 
him in the church meeting. The danger is, he 
is so plausible, and seems so right, so concerned 
for the good of Zion, that, like the old giant in 
the Pilgrim's Progress, he spoils young pilgrims 
with sophistry. Let all young pilgrims look out 
lest they fall into his snare, and become like him 
in his vile calling; and let them watch what 
weight there is to the word he says about the 
man or the thing he dislikes, for to be like Gash- 
mu is to be one of the most pitiful and paltry of 
men. 

Finally, we must pity Gashmu ; for, after all, 



GASHMU. 



159 



like all men who do wrong, he was finally the 
greater sufferer. There was, on that September 
morning, for all we know, a decent man who 
might rest, when his little life was ended, as qui- 
etly as his fathers were resting in the old Assyr- 
ian hills. Yet before nightfall he had said a few 
words that have impaled him on the lonely peak 
of twenty-two centuries, in an awful solitude, of 
warning to every man who will not consider the 
eternal sacredness of the words he may be saying 
about another, and their long and deep duration. 

He told a lie, in his narrow prejudice, against 
a good man who was doing a good work for his 
country, his church, and his race, and now he 
can never rest. The Bible, that chains him fast 
to this everlasting damnation, has been sometimes 
almost lost out of the world, buried in seclusion, 
hidden in mountains, and caves, and dens. It has 
been found again, printed, translated into every 
tongue, and is read to-day, as the earth wheels 
round the sun, by untold millions of men and wo- 
men. Wherever one holds a Bible, he can get at 
this story, how Gashmu lied when he could have 
told the truth, and is convicted before all the 
ages and all the angels ; is the. real Wandering 



160 



GASHMU. 



Jew unable to die. Need I say, then, do not 
try to be avenged on Gashmu. Vengeance 
is mine, saith the Lord ; I will repay. Surely 
there is no man who will not rest his course 
with God after such an example as this, and in- 
stead of the bitterness we all feel when we are 
so wronged by Gashmu, pity the hapless fate of 
the wrong-doers, and cry, as one cried who was 
wronged as we never can be, — " Father, forgive 
them ; they know not what they do." 



VIII. 



STORMING HEAVEN. 

Luke xi. 5-10 : " And he said unto them, Which of you shall 
have a friend, and shall go unto him at midnight, and say 
unto him, Friend, lend me three loaves; for a friend of 
mine in his journey is come to me, and I have nothing to 
set before him ? And he from within shall answer and say, 
Trouble me not; the door is now shut, and my children are 
with me in bed ; I cannot rise and give thee. I say unto 
you, Though he will not rise and give him, because he is 
his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and 
give him as many as he needeth. And I say unto you, Ask, 
and it shall be given you ; seek, and ye shall find ; knock, 
and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that ask- 
eth, receiveth ; and he that seeketh, findeth ; and to him that 
knocketh, it shall be opened." 

The text, in connection with what precedes it, 
seems singular. When Jesus had been praying 
in a certain place, his disciples came to him, and 
said, " Lord, teach us to pray ; " and he taught them 
the Lord's Prayer. But when he had done this, 
he goes on to speak to them in a parable that 
seems to cast a new light on some of these rela- 
tions of man to God that are to be affected through 
11 161 



162 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



this mysterious agency. For, instead of repre- 
senting the divine nature as so open and tremu- 
lous to our cry that it needs not even a whisper 
when we pray, but can hear our sighing and be 
stirred by our longing, it is opened to us here as 
if wrapped in a slumber heavy as midnight, and 
only to be awakened by our persistent and most 
urgent endeavor. 

In all the words of the Messiah which we pos- 
sess, there is but one other parable touching the 
same principle. It is where the widow comes, in 
her helplessness, to the unjust judge, who neither 
fears God nor regards man, and cries, " Avenge 
me of mine adversary." He has no mind to listen 
to her cry ; she is the embodiment of all helpless- 
ness ; there is no eloquence in her words, no gift 
in her hands, and no reason in the world why he 
should attend to her, except her simple persist- 
ence in urging her claim: but that carries the 
day against every obstacle. Her continual cry 
for what she has a right to seek has in it a touch 
of omnipotence ; so he gives that to importunity 
he would not give as a duty or a right. 

The first feeling we have about the matter is, 
either that there has been some mistake in the 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



163 



way these parables are reported, or that it is hope- 
less for us to try to understand them. We say, this 
householder asleep at midnight ! What can this 
mean ? I think the meaning is, that J esus would 
teach us in this way what we are learning in 
many other ways — that the best things in the di- 
vine life, as in the natural, will not come to us 
merely for the asking ; that true prayer is the 
whole strength of the whole man going out after 
his needs, and the real secret of getting what 
you want in heaven, as on earth, lies in the fact 
that you give your whole heart for it, or you 
cannot adequately value it when you get it. So, 
" Ask, and it shall be given you ; seek, and you 
shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto 
you," means, Put out all your energies, as if 
you had to waken heaven out of a midnight slum- 
ber, or an indifference like that of the unjust 
judge. 

This I conceive to have been the meaning of 
Christ in the parable ; and it touches something 
in our life we seldom adequately consider, namely, 
what I would call the indifference of God to any- 
thing less than the best there is in man — the 
determination of Heaven, if I may say so, not to 



164 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



hear what we are not determined Heaven shall 
hear. So calling out the faculty that lies hidden 
in our nature, to answer to another deep word of 
this great Teacher, " The kingdom of heaven suf- 
fereth violence, and the violent take it by force ; " 
and any adequate answer to our cry of, " Let thy 
kingdom come/' must greatly lie in our power to 
bring in the kingdom. 

We can see this principle at work, if we will, 
first in nature. It fills the whole distance between 
the paradise of the first pair and this common 
earth as we find it to-day. In that old Eden, 
there was no barrier between the longing and its 
answer, and no effort needed to bring the answer, 
except the longing. The kindly, easy, effortless 
life went on, we suppose, as life might "have gone 
on in the Sandwich Islands before Cook discov- 
ered them, had their inhabitants possessed the 
secret of how to live, in addition to their perfect 
climate, and the daily bread that came almost 
without the asking. 

In this life of ours, however, there is no such 
answer to our natural cry for what we need. 
The need may be, in its way, divine, and the 
longing as divine as the need; but before they 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



165 



can come to their full fruition, barriers have 
to be broken down that seem to have been 
put there by Heaven itself. There is always a 
divine inertness and hinderance to be overcome 
before we can come to what is more divine 
than that which we possess. 

I can remember nothing in my childhood, 
for instance, of a deeper interest than the 
stories I used to read of hapless travellers cross- 
ing the Alps, and being overtaken by the storm 
and lost, of their rescue by the great sagacious 
dogs and their masters, and their restoration to 
life ; and the old interest was still so strong in 
1865, that when I came to the foot of one of the 
great passes which I had no time to cross, I lin- 
gered about it with an almost tireless interest. 

But I went to see also the new railroad they 
are making by a tunnel through Mount Cenis, 
that shall do away forever with the hardship 
and danger of the passes over the mountains, 
and open up a new and living way between 
Switzerland and Italy. And there I caught, I 
think, the first hint of this barrier thrown up 
by Heaven across its own highways. For in 
spite of the bemoanings of Mr. Ruskin about 



166 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



desecrating the holy shrines of these lakes and 
mountains with the scream of the locomotive, 
and the careless tread of the multitude on their 
cheap trip, I can imagine no comparison be- 
tween such a road and the old track over their 
crests that does not prove the railroad the more 
heavenly way, in safety to life, in salvation from 
suffering, in economy of time, in closeness of 
intercourse, in facility lor seeing whatever is 
most glorious on either side, in opening the 
pages of that poem of the world to the million, 
that until now has been closed to all but the few* 
The railroad is beyond all comparison the better 
and diviner way. 

But the moment the nations began to long for 
such a road, the barriers against it began to 
appear. The earth is the Lord's, and he made 
it ; but for such a railroad he made no pro- 
vision beyond this, — that no man can touch or 
weigh or measure the determination of some 
men that there shall be one. " Let us have a 
railroad," they say; and then they go to work, 
with the geometries that are a part of the order 
of the universe, to find the way. They trace 
it along the' old natural levels, and it would seem 



STOEMING HEAVEN. 



167 



as if they were made to be an answer to this 
prayer ; but then at last they come to the moun- 
tain, to the great inert divine hinderance, as 
immovable as the midnight slumber on the un- 
willing heart. " We want a railroad into Italy/' 
cries the world, " and can go no farther for this 
mountain. What shall we do to find a way ? " 
" There is no way/' Heaven answers, " except to 
your persistency; but if you seek, you shall find ; 
if you knock, it shall be opened to you." And 
so the seeking of the answer to that prayer of 
the nations is intrusted to the keen sight of 
men whose searching will never tire until the 
way is found. The 'knocking is with hard steel 
at the hard rock, and it is only a question of 
persistence and of endurance ; then at last it has 
come to pass that even the heart of the unwill- 
ing mountain is won, and its midnight sleep 
driven away ; and where for countless ages there 
has been only an utter and unutterable silence, 
there is now the mighty response of an an- 
swered prayer in the thunder of the locomotive. 

We touch this principle again in a more 
personal way when we observe this striving in 
the experiences of men. Not to mention at this 



168 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



moment what is most purely spiritual in these 
conflicts, there is deep instruction in watching 
how some man is moved to do some thing that 
is to bless the world in a new and wonderful 
way when it is done ; but between the con- 
ception and the conclusion there are mighty 
barriers, that only the uttermost might of what 
is indeed a divine persistence can finally over- 
come. It flashes on the soul with something of 
the nature of a revelation when it is done. 
Men say he must have been inspired to do it. 
Its blessing is so clear that we can almost see 
the shining track on which it has come from God 
to man. It would be natural to think then the 
way must be clear between the conception and 
execution of such a thing, not only because of 
the nobility of the thing itself, but of the urgent 
need of it among men. Yet the new child is 
still laid in the manger, and has to struggle in 
the long lapse between the birth and the bap- 
tism through the hinderance of its Nazareth, 
while the world must wait and want until all 
the barriers in the way of its coming are broken 
down. 

How strikingly — to take, what is right at our 



STORMTNG HEAVEN. 



169 



hand — this has been brought home to us in the 
wonderful history of the perfecting of India- 
rubber ! Delicately winning its way into the most 
essential arts and uses of life, no mean agent 
in our new civilization, so indispensable is it, 
now we have learned its use, that if it should 
be suddenly taken away, it would leave a great 
gap in our commonwealth, and shorten the aver- 
ages of human life. I know of nothing more 
impressive in the line of my thought than that 
long prayer, as I must call it, of the inventor, by 
which at last he won the unlistening heavens 
over to his side. With a faith in the thing he 
wanted to do, teachers of religion might well 
imitate ; with as little care for the mere wealth 
that might come of his discovery as a man could 
well feel; consecrating every power and every 
penny he could command to the one great pur- 
pose ; counted a madman by the sensible, easy- 
going world about him, that could neither feel 
the burden of his soul, nor win its reward, — the 
story of the way in which he persisted, year 
after year, in broken health and utter poverty, 
and what was worse than starvation for himself, 
in wrestling with the silent and seemingly dumb 



170 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



heavens for their revelations, is one of the most 
touching things in. the history of our human 
life. 

There was the blessing all the time hidden in 
the heart of Providence. What the thing is now 
with us, we cannot but believe it was then 
with God. But what the world believed in old 
time, as it dwelt within the shadows of a cruel 
superstition, still comes true to us, as we dwell 
in the clear daylight of the divine law, — that 
when a man will win some mighty blessing 
for his fellow-men, the blessing can only come 
at the cost of his most precious blood : he 
must not grow weary ; he must weary that 
which holds the secret. Let him give up his 
search too soon, let him knock too seldom, the 
householder will not rise ; the bread will not be 
given. The only comfort there is, — and it is 
the only one we need, — is this, that when once 
a man casts his whole manhood into the thing 
God has stirred him up to seek, he never does 
knock too often ; but if he must, he dies knock- 
ing, and then leaves another at the door. 

They knocked more than two hundred years 
for the locomotive before the door was opened, 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



171 



and if you have read this history of Mr. Good- 
year, to which T have referred, you will remem- 
ber how at last the full revelation of the secret 
came in a flash, as when the diamond seeker 
watches for the sudden sheen of his treasure be- 
tween the sand and the sun. But it was the eye 
that had been seeking patiently, persistently, and 
steadily through these long years that found the 
treasure, as when the apple fell ; if we had been 
there, we should have seen an apple fall where 
Newton saw the whole order of the suns and 
stars, because he had been wearying heaven night 
and day for years to open her doors to his be- 
. seeching about that matter. 

And if we leave these semi-material things, and 
consider what is, perhaps, more purely in the 
line of the parable, it is only to see still more 
certainly how certain is this matter of the tin- 
listening ear and unwilling heart of Providence 
in the experiences of the noblest and best. The 
whole history of man, in his higher relations to 
G-od, is the history of a struggle through the most 
disheartening and perplexing hinderances into the 
light and life in which the soul so led can break 
the bread of life to others. The truth the man 



172 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



has to tell, he has first to win at a cost which 
leaves nothing else of any worth by comparison, 
and then his very life is cheerfully given, if need 
be, rather than the truth shall fail. 

I will venture to say, there is not a supreme 
man of God, in any time, or race, or religion, 
whose power may not be understood better by 
this test than by any other we can find ; sent 
into the world, with the purpose he finally fulfils 
folded within his soul ; inspired from above to 
enter on his work ; sealed when his work is done, 
and set fast forever among the prophets and 
apostles of the race, you shall always find that 
there is a time stretching often over a long span 
of years in which the man had to strive and pray, 
to weary Heaven by his incessant beseeching, 
until at last, perhaps, when it became a ques- 
tion with those who were aware of the contest, 
whether Heaven should hear or the man should 
die, the heart of the great secret is won, the 
angel says, " Thou shalt be called no longer Jacob, 
but Israel, because thou hast wrestled with God 
and prevailed ; " and then, in the strength of his 
well-won blessing, he is forever after set among 
the great ones of the world. 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



173 



But the truth was as true before the man was 
born, as it is when he is like to die in his strug- 
gle to pluck it out of the silence in which it is 
hidden. Descartes and Kepler did not set the 
heavens in the order they almost died to dis- 
cover; justification by faith was as true when 
Luther was singing his Christmas hymns as 
when he was worn away with the misery of his 
crying, " How shall man be just with God ? " The 
loaves are there ; the whole secret is in the win- 
ning, and in why they have to be so won, as the 
hills and valleys of Canaan were standing in the 
clear sunshine through all that forty years Israel 
was wading wearily through the desert towards 
them. 

So, then, we come, through these illustrations 
of this principle in our life, to some lessons which 
we shall all do well to learn ; and I cannot mention 
one before this : that instead of a prayer being 
something we can say easily at any time and be 
* done with, can read out of a book, or have said 
for us by a minister, — in the most sacred and 
essential sense, a true prayer must be the deep- 
est and most painful thing a man can possibly do : 
may be so costly that he will give up, without a 
murmur, his very life, before he will give up that 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



which his prayer has wrested, as it were, out of 
the heart uf the heavens ; and it may be so pro- 
tracted, that twenty years shall not suffice to 
say it. 

For prayer, in its purest reality, is first the cry 
of the soul to God for his gift, and then it is the 
effort of the soul to make as sure of what it longs 
for, as if it were to come by its own winning. It 
is something in which the words we say are often 
of the smallest possible consequence, and only 
our unconquerable persistence under God is 
omnipotent. And that this longing and striving, 
as shadowed out in the parable, should be so pain- 
ful and protracted, is only a wonder when we lose 
sight of the revelations made to us in almost 
every other direction. 

I went once to see the Cathedral at Cologne. 
It is the most wonderful blossoming of Gothic 
art on the planet. Hundreds of years ago some 
man, now forgotten, found it all in his heart, and 
longed to make it visible in stone. But because 
it was so great and good, when the man died his 
work was still unfinished ; it was still unfinished 
when his name was forgotten ; at last, even the 
design of it was lost, and it seemed as if there 
was no hope that the Cathedral would ever be 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



175 



done. But when Napoleon went storming through 
Europe, his marshals lighted on the old design, 
hidden in some dusty corner of a monastery ; so it 
got back again to Cologne, and when I was there, 
all Germany was interested in finishing the noble 
idea. 

Now, since that church was begun, thousands 
of churches have risen and fallen in Germany, 
and no trace of them is left ; but because the 
Dome Kirch is the grandest thing in its way that 
was ever done in stone, or ever conceived in a 
soul, two things follow: there must be a mighty 
span between the conception and the consumma- 
tion, a striving through dark days and fearful 
hinderances to build it, and, at the same time, an 
indestructible vitality in the idea, like that which 
has attended it. It is but a shadow of this great 
fact concerning our spiritual life. The very 
worth of what we ask for from the heavens, be- 
cause it is so worthy, is the deepest reason there 
is why the blessing cannot come until the full, 
time — until it has had its own time. 

It is, therefore, no reason why a man earnestly 
engaged in a true reform in the ideas or the 
conduct of life, should become disheartened, and 



176 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



think of giving up, when the thing, being in his 
opinion a matter of such supreme importance to 
mankind, and so verily a truth of God, does not 
win its way more rapidly or receive more open 
marks of the divine favor, but has to labor under 
every possible disadvantage, and be as if the 
heart of Heaven was unwilling to recognize its 
claim. It is probable that in exact proportion to 
the worth of the thing will be the strife for the 
place it must finally take, and the work it- must 
finally do ; and this, not that Heaven is on the 
other side or indifferent, but it will make full 
proof of those who are to be intrusted with the 
mighty interest, and make the worth of the in- 
terest clear. 

And so the principle I have noticed in the life 
of the reformer, is to be noticed also of every great 
reform : it has to wait, and work its way persist- 
ently through the most determined opposition; 
through times in which there is no encourage- 
ment at all, except that which is in the hearts of 
those who are devoted to it, who know right well 
if they ask, and seek, and knock, and do not tire, 
but keep right on, then, as sure as there is an eter- 
nal right, the wrong will be at last conquered, 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



177 



and Heaven will be won to give what they shall 
not be weary asking. Then, for reform and re- 
former alike, will come the answer to the prayer 
of the old apostle, " The God of all grace, who 
hath called you nnto his eternal glory after that 
ye have suffered awhile, establish, strengthen, 
settle you, and make you perfect." 

And so it must be with those reforms in which 
we take an interest in these days : the reform 
in religious ideas, by which we are all at last 
to come to the unity of spirit in the bond 
of peace ; to one Lord, one faith, and one bap- 
tism : or the woman question, in which simple 
natural justice will take the place of the pre- 
scriptions and miserable unfairness of the old 
ages : or intemperance, in which the common- 
wealth is not now ashamed to be implicated in 
licensing what works more ruin than every other 
course of which we have any knowledge : or 
this labor question, in which, as yet, the one side 
is tyrant now, and then the other, and each seeks 
only its own ; as if the relation between man and 
man was a great tumor of human selfishness. 
These and all other questions assuming in these 
days a vital importance are touched by the para- 
12 



178 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



ble. In the long span that they must take be- 
tween the conception and the consummation, 
Heaven will seem to be dead to the cry of those 
that hold them in their hearts'; but they can be 
sure, as if victory had crowned their banners, 
4 that when the full time has come, then will come 
the full answer to their cry, and not one grain 
of what is locked fast in God's truth and right- 
eousness of the thing they strive for can ever 
be lost out of the good endeavor. 

So, once more, when we remember that this 
life each man and woman is living, is to the liver 
by far the most precious thing he can have to 
do with ; how its experiences, lessons, and re- 
sults enter into the very substance of the soul ; 
we must not wonder if some things we have 
at heart do not come to pass so readily as we 
may think they ought, being so surely the gift 
of Heaven, but lag and linger after all our 
longing, and the endeavor which is in itself a 
prayer, as if Heaven is determined indeed we 
shall not have them, or is deaf to our cry. It 
is possible in the light of the lessons I have 
tried to draw, not from the parable alone, but 
from the deep and constant facts of life that 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



179 



come up and range themselves about the para- 
ble, that the very magnitude and worth of the 
thing we want may be the reason why it is de- 
layed, as well as that the things which come into 
our possession in waiting for it and striving for 
it, are quite as good to have and to hold as the 
thing itself. 

The young man strives for what we call suc- 
cess in life ; by which we mean, too often, money 
enough to be independent of any of those sur- 
prises of a good Providence which always fall 
to the lot of the poor, earnest, struggling man, 
and a position in which he can stand, as nearly 
as possible, like to the golden image the king 
set up in the plains of Dura. But let it be a 
real success the young man aims at — the success 
of being most useful and powerful for good ; the 
thing he seeks may still be delayed by its very 
magnitude and excellence. 

There is a fine illustration of this in one nota- 
ble family that sprang up not far from the place 
where I was born. Long ago the fore-elders wei;e 
small farmers, but four generations back the man 
of that time began to feel after a better place — 
to knock at the door of heaven for a rise. When 



180 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



he died he had a little spinning interest and a 
well-grown son who built up, bit by bit, through 
a long life and many hard fortunes, the idea he 
had derived from his father. In the third genera- 
tion the effort had come to be a splendid suc- 
cess, and in the fourth it culminated, probably, 
in a man who with wealth and education had 
a noble native power that had been growing 
gradually ever since that great-grandsire felt 
moved to knock and ask for something better 
than to cultivate a hungry Lancashire upland. 
This man in his day rendered a service to Eng- 
land second to none. He was 

" The statesman in the council set, 

Who knew the seasons, when to take 
Occasion by the hand, and make 
The bounds of freedom wider yet." 

And so, I think, if the eldest of all, in his grim 
struggle to get the blessing of success — for a 
real, healthy success is a blessing — could have 
seen the youngest standing at the helm, and 
guiding the ship of state through some of her 
most dangerous passages, and then could have 
seen how the great qualities that made him so 
eminent had not come, by a mere chance, but 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



181 



were intimately interlocked with all the good 
lights the whole ancestry ha4 fought against 
what seemed to them often to be an inert or un- 
willing Providence, he would have been satisfied 
that this whole four-fold life, being in a deep 
sense also one life, should be perfected in this 
Sir Robert. 

So, if God visits the sins, he also visits the 
holiness, of the fathers upon the children, unto 
the third and fourth generation. Let no man, 
therefore, striving hard to succeed, but held back 
by hinderance, conclude that a poor mite of this 
world's wealth is all that he is to get out of the 
endeavor. It is as certain as anything can be,, 
that one or more of those children about hi& 
knees, who already know something of his heart- 
sickness, are feeling afresh the power to knock 
which -may be failing in himself, and what he 
cannot give them in a banker's balance, will still 
come to them in a wealth that is infinitely better, 
— the wealth of a clear head, and a strong heart, 
and a divine persistence in seeking what it is his 
hunger and thirst to find. 

My heart would be heavy, sometimes, did I 
not believe that my own good father, whose ut- 



182 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



most endeavor could never carry him beyond 
the anvil, — at which he fell down dead from 
over- work many years ago, — is aware, as he 
abides in the rest that remains for all weary men 
and women, how the children for whom he cared, 
and wrought, and died, had come into possession 
of what is better than the money he could never 
save, — the life, good and true he lived for their 
sakes, and gave for their blessing. 

It is to me one of the most cruel and inhu- 
man things that is ever done, to make a man an 
outcast from Christian society and sympathy, 
who, sincerely seeking to know the truth about 
God, and the soul, and immortal life, still has to 
tell us he cannot believe it; that, after all he 
can do, these things are all in the dark, the doors 
will not open, the treasure is still hidden away, 
the gift of God still held back after all his knock- 
ing and cries. The time will come, as the Lord 
liveth, when such men and women will com- 
mand the deepest sympathy and tenderness re- 
ligion has to give. When, instead of the church 
casting them out beyond her borders, she will 
gather them into her very heart ; will learn what 
this meant which her great Captain said, " The 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



183 



Son of man came to seek and to save that which 
was lost." 

It is not so now ; and yet to men and women 
with such doubts, 1 say, the very magnitude and 
worth of the thing you are seeking may well 
be the deepest reason why you shall not soon 
find it, but shall be led still to seek, and strug- 
gle, and cry, and watch those that are satisfied, 
and to say, " I would give the world if I could feel 
as they do." It may well be that your prayer for 
the revelation you need will span your whole 
lifetime ; that now and then there will be a flash, 
and then again the dark : yet what you come to 
in this seeking, is a treasure you could not come 
to in the finding. 

"You make the larger faith your own; 
The power is with you in the night 
That makes the darkness and the light, 
And dwells not in the light alone." 

It is only and altogether essential that we 
shall be sure the treasure is there : that this is 
no delusion, which has come sweeping through 
human souls in floods of living light, filling them 
with joy unspeakable and full of glory, bringing 
God so near that they have instinctively called 



184 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



him Father ; so informing them of heaven, that it 
never occurred to them any one could doubt it ; 
quickening the soul so with the sense of her im- 
mortality, that she would soar and sing immortal 
songs out of her heart's treasure, and nerve her 
poor organism to meet the axe, or cross, or flame, 
as quietly as if it was but the pleasant prelude 
to her rest. You must believe, struggling, 
doubting, seeking, beseeching man or woman that 
the door opened to them will be opened to you. 
They found the gift you are seeking ; the silent 
heavens heard them at last, and gave them all 
they sought. 

Only this one thing we must never disbelieve. 
Let us say we cannot believe in God, or heaven, 
or immortality ourselves, if that indeed be the 
condition of our own souls. It cannot be wrong 
to tell the truth ; and if this be the truth in our 
religious experience, that the householder has 
not risen to give us bread, it is a simple fact, 
and to tell it, if I feel I must, is honest and 
manful ; but it is a wretched thing to assail 
that great multitude no man can number, who 
through all the ages have compelled Heaven to 
hear their cries, have eaten the bread of life 



STORMING HEAVEN. 



185 



and are satisfied, who do believe in God and 
immortality, and have left a broad, shining track 
that can never grow dim. 

The uttermost woe that can come to a man 
from this direction, is not the inability he feels 
in himself to find these mighty confidences, but 
the inability to believe they have ever been 
found; that the householder has ever risen to 
give bread to any soul. It is ashes to ashes, and 
dust to dust, when I make my own destitution 
the measure of the fulness of the gospel of God. 
It is as foolish for me to do that, as it would 
be for a blind man to turn his blank orbs to the 
June glory, and say, " I see all there is." Let me 
still rest in this solid certainty, that multitudes, 
through all the ages, have succeeded, where I 
have failed ; winning the bread I hunger for ; 
finding the answer denied to my cry ; the answer 
that I shall surely find in the fulness of time or 
of eternity. Amen. 



IX. 

WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 

Mark vi. 20 : " Herod feared John." 

Herod was a king; John was a subject. Herod 
was in a palace ; John was in a prison. Herod 
wore a crown; John most probably did not even 
own a turban. Herod wore the purple ; John 
wore camlet, as we should call it. Soldiers 
and servants watched the eye of Herod, and 
waited on his will ; only the headsman waited 
hungrily for John. Herod came of a line that 
had never been famous either for morals or 
religion : they said, practically what a famous 
American long afterwards said verbally, "that 
religion is a very good thing in its place ; " they 
had done . their best to establish a government in 
which the old Jewish worship should serve as 
a decoy duck to the new Jewish kingdom ; they 
made it what the State forever makes the 
Church when it gets a chance — a fountain of 

186 



WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 



187 



preferment, with which it can bribe or buy the 
upper, and a mystic spell by which it can weave 
fetters of superstition for the lower, classes ; 
and up to this time the dynasty had succeeded 
substantially in doing what it proposed to do. 
Yet still " Herod feared John." 

Herod, the elder, father of this Herod Anti- 
pas who feared . John, was a man of notable 
power. Appointed over Judea by J ulius Csesar, 
about forty-seven years before our Christian 
era, he fought his way through invasion from 
without and treachery from within, until he 
had at last established the throne on what 
seemed, for those times, to be deep foundations. 
He was what one might call an Eclectic in re- 
ligion. When he ascended the throne, he made 
offerings to Jupiter of the capitol; his coins, 
as well as those of his son, bear only Greek 
inscriptions. Yet he rebuilt the temple at Je- 
rusalem in a style of magnificence surpass- 
ing even that of Solomon. But then he built 
a temple for the Samaritans, too ; and, indeed, 
was a man full of politeness — a sort of human 
Pantheon, in which Greek and Roman, Jew and 
Samaritan, were welcome to set up their sym- 



188 WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 



bols, — for which he cared no more than if he 
himself had been so much marble ; and finally, 
so far as we can trace him, he left his princi- 
ples and his kingdom, in the full prime of their 
strength, to his son. 

John was the son of an obscure Jewish coun- 
try priest and his wife: the child of their old age. 
There is no hint that John had any wealth, or 
name, or fame, or education, or influence, when 
he began his life as a man. He comes on the 
scene* as a rough, angular man, with not many 
words and not many friends. Herod began to 
reign just about when John began to live, so that 
there was no preponderant age in the priest's 
son over the king's son : that was all on the 
other side. 

Indeed, by all mere surface facts, principles, 
and analogies, John ought to have feared Herod ; 
he ought to have bated his breath and bent his 
head before him. John's life was not worth 
thirty minutes' purchase, if Herod did but give 
the sign to kill him. And John knew that, and 
Herod knew it too. Yet they rise up like ghosts 
before us out of that distant time — the king 
in the palace, the reformer in the prison; the 



WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 



189 



king with the sceptre in his hand, the reformer 
with the shackle on his wrist. But the eye of 
the prisoner burns with a clear lustre, and looks 
right on ; the eye of the king quails under its 
drooping lid. The hand of the prisoner is cool, 
and his foot firm; his head erect/ and his voice 
clear as the voice of a trumpet. The hand of 
the king is hot, his step uncertain, his head 
bowed, and his voice broken, and, as you watch 
them, you get a great sense that the two men 
have somehow changed places — the king is a 
prisoner, the prisoner a king. 

Now, I propose to discuss at this time the 
roots of this power and weakness, to see 
what made Herod so weak and John so strong, 
and to ask this question, What can we, who 
are set as John was, in the advance guard of 
reformers, do to make a deep, clear mark? 

And 1 note for you that John had three great 
roots of power : First, he was a powerful man 
by creation — a man with a clear head, a steady 
nerve, and a nature set in a deadly antagonism 
to sin and meanness of every sort and degree. 
He was the Jewish John Knox, or John Brown. 

" When he saw a thing was true, 
He went to work and put it through." 



190 



WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 



He could die, but he could not back down. Now, 
truly, there is a sure and solid principle at the 
heart of these old chronicles that tell us how 
angels came as messengers from God to notify 
the world of the advent of his most glorious 
sons ; that when God wants a particular sort of 
man, to do a singular work for him, at a critical 
time, he makes him, and sends him, angel-guard- 
ed, to his place ; so that no man can be John, 
but John himself. 

Every time 1 meet a man who is a man, and 
not a stick, I ask myself one question : " Why 
are you the man you are ? Whence does your 
power hint itself to me? Whence does it 
come ? " And while the ultimate answer has 1 
never come out of Phrenology, or Physiognomy, 
or any of the sciences that profess to tell you 
what a man is by how he looks, yet the indica- 
tive answer has always lain in that direction. 
In the head, and face, and form of a man there 
is certainly something that impresses you in 
some such way as the weight, color, and inscrip- 
tion of a coin reveal to you, with a fair certainty, 
whether it be gold, or silver, or — brass ; and it 
is possible, too, that the line in which a man has 



WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 



191 



descended, the country in which he is born, the 
climate, the scenery, the history, the poetry, and 
the society about him, have a great deal to do 
with the man. 

The father, in Queeu Elizabeth's time, as I 
have known in old English families, may be 
twenty-two carat gold ; and the children in 
Queen Victoria's time may be no better than 
lead. That mysterious antagonism that sows 
tares among the wheat, sows baseness in the 
blood ; and if there be not forever a careful and 
most painful dividing and burning, the tares will 
in time come to nearly all there is pn the soil. 
But still forever the great mint of Providence 
beats on, silently, certainly, continually, sending 
its own new golden coins to circulate through 
our human life, and on each of them stamping 
the infallible image and superscription that tells 
us " this is gold." Nay, the same great Provi- 
dence makes not only gold coins, but silver and 
iron, too ; and if they are true to their ring, 
they are all divine ; as in all great houses there 
be divers vessels, some to more honor and some 
to less honor, but not one to dishonor if it be true 
to its purpose ; for while the golden vase that 



192 WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 



holds the wine at the feast of a king is a vessel 
of honor, so is the iron pot that holds the meats 
in the furnace ; the Parian vase that you fill 
with flowers is a vessel of honor, and so is the 
tin dipper with which you fill it at the well. 

For me, it is a wonderful thing to study mere- 
ly the pictures of great men. There is a power 
in the very shadow that makes you feel they 
were born to be kings and priests unto God. 
But if you know a great man personally, you 
find a power in him which the picture can never 
give you. It is the difference between the pic- 
ture of a tree and a tree, or between paste and 
jewels ; and as you try to reach back to first 
principles, to search out the reason why he is 
what he is, — as you search for it in the sciences 
I have mentioned, and in family descent, and in 
climate, and scenery, and society, — though these 
all hint some truth to us, they are at the best 
only as the figures and pointers on the dial. 
Their utmost use is to mark the movement 
within ; and that movement is worthless, if it be 
not chorded with the sun and stars. And so, 
too, I love those old, solemn, primitive affirma- 
tions that make the outward of the best men but 
indicative of the inward, and that again a tran- 



WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 



193 



script of the mind of God. So I care little for our 
birth and breeding, if there is this purpose of God, 
that we shall be genuine in our inmost nature. 

I suppose this good Jewish country parson, 
the father of John, from the little we can glean 
about him, was just a gentle, timid, pious, re- 
tiring man, whose mind had never risen above 
the routine of his humble post in the temple ; a 
man who would have talked for a week, or a 
month, or a year about some little courtesy 
Herod had shown him ; a man devoted to the 
priesthood, just as the father of Franklin, in this 
old town of Boston, was to the making of can- 
dles, or Luther's father in Germany to the mak- 
ing of charcoal, or Shakespeare's to the selling 
of oxen at Stratford, or Johnson's of books — 
good, true men, iron, copper, or silver, and bid- 
ding fair to raise a family that is iron, or copper, 
or silver, too. But lo ! God, in the full time, 
drops just one golden ingot down into that fam- 
ily treasury, pure, ponderous, solid gold ; for 

4 4 It is the growing soul within the man 
That makes the man grow : 
Just as the fiery sap the touch from God 
Careering through a tree dilates the bark, 
So life deepening within us deepens all." 

13 



194 WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 



Yet I need not tell you that there is a theory 
of human nature that busies itself forever in 
trying to prove that our human nature in itself 
is abominably and naturally despicable. Towards 
their fellow-men, the holders of this idea are as 
particular about their character and standing 
as the rest of us. They shall rise from their 
prayers, in which they have called themselves 
twenty hard names, and if you repeat over but 
one of them, instantly they are offended. To- 
wards us, they are as particular upon points of 
honor as a Spaniard. Towards God, they turn 
with not one shred of self-respect — " they like 
to be despised." They insist upon it that God 
never cast a golden coin into this world at all 
— that our common human nature is nothing 
but base metal, with awful chances that it will 
ever be aught else — that if saved, then saved 
by transmutation — if lost, then lost because, 
though the Almighty considered them worth 
making, he did not consider them worth trans- 
muting. 

There are two replies to this theory. The 
first is found in that good story you have all 
read in a lately printed book. "Janet," said 



WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 195 



the minister, " there is really nothing in you 
that is at all worthy of salvation. Now, suppose 
God, at the last, should let, you drop into hell. 
What would you say to that?" Janet was on 
her death bed. She had been all her life in this 
dark shadow of a possible predestination to the 
pit. But she had lain still in her room, in this 
sickness, a long time, and her soul had caught, 
now and again, with great distinctive vividness, 
a flash of the Eternal Light that at these times 
touches the soul from the land where the Lord 
God is the Sun. " Minister/' Janet said, quietly, 
" I have thought it all over. I believe God will 
do with me just whatever he has a mind to do. 
I cannot tell what he will do. But this I know : 
he made me ; I am the work of his hands ; and 
if he puts me down into hell, he will lose more 
by doing it than I shall by bearing it." The 
second reply is embodied in the fact, that God 
does in all times and places send golden men 
into this world. Gold is the mine, it may be ; 
or gold and sand and mica — gold that needs to 
be pounded, and melted, and purified by fire ; 
but still, at the heart of all, real gold, — gold by 
creation, and not by transmutation, — needing 



196 "WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 

only what it finds in God and in life to bring it 
out into full perfection. 

Now, this primitive intrinsic nature, I say, was 
the first element that made John mightier in 
the prison than Herod was in the palace. The 
one was a king by creation ; the other was only 
a king by descent. And then, secondly, there 
comes into the difference another element. 
Herod made the purple vile by his sin; John 
made the camel's hair radiant by his holiness. 
And in that personal truth, this rightwiseness, 
this wholeness, he gained every divine force in 
the universe over to his side, and left to Herod 
only the infernal forces. It was a question of 
power, reaching back ultimately, as all such 
questions do, to God and the devil. So the 
fetter was turned to a sceptre, and the sceptre 
to a fetter, and the soul of the Sybarite quailed, 
and went down before the soul of the saint. 

Now this, as we enter into his spirit and life, 
is what comes home to us with the most invin- 
cible power and clearness. We weigh the hints 
of those old writers about John, and gather from 
them that he was intrinsically sound, from the 
outermost surface to the innermost centre of his 



WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 



197 



life. Whatever error he might make in being 
hard and insensible to the beauty and glory, the 
more tender and lovable aspects of life, his life, 
as he got it, was a whole life. There are not 
many men in this world who begin life deter- 
mined to be sinful. The set of our determi- 
nation is the other way. I think God takes care 
that every young man shall get flashes of the 
beauty of holiness, and of the ghastliness of 
sin ; and that no man will quietly determine to 
break away from that passable beauty, with no 
hope of getting back again. But a great num- 
ber of young men begin to sin spasmodicaUy. 
They drink the waters of sin, as the dog in 
Egypt is said to drink of the Nile. Being in 
a wholesome fear of some lurking crocodile, he 
just laps a little, and then runs a little, and so 
keeps on lapping and running, until he is either 
satisfied or snapped up. 

Then there is a second class of men, who start 
in life determined to go right on, and to do just 
about right. And they do seem to go right on j 
yet still, when they themselves measure their 
track by long distances, there is a shadow of 
deflection. They are conscious of bearing a 



198 WHY HEROD FEAEED JOHN. 

little to the left. They are not in the direct line 
in which they started. While no one step seems 
to be more than a hair's breadth out of the true 
line, and- one earnest moment every day, one 
careful observation by the Eternal Sun, would 
put them right, yet they do not take it. It is 
easier sailing as it is. When the Indian, on the 
great prairies of the Far West, goes out to hunt 
the wild horse, and the horse, seeing him come, 
shakes his mane, and gallops with the fleetness 
of the wind, he never follows directly in the 
track of the animal he is after, for he knows it 
will be hopeless trying to overtake him that way. 
But he simply observes the almost insensible 
deflection of his victim from the true line, and 
he knows that the horse is sure to keep on that 
side of the line. So he crosses the arc of flight, 
as the string crosses the bow, with the certainty 
of meeting his victim at the point of attachment, 
though he may never see him for fifty miles. 
So sin and retribution are victim and victor ! 
So the line of deflection becomes itself the guide 
to retribution ! All day long the wrong-doer sees 
only the boundless landscape, and speeds along, 
rejoicing in the vast latitudes of freedom ; but at 



WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 199 

sunset his neck is in the lasso, and he is led 
captive by the devil at his will. 

Then the good man, the true, upright, down- 
right man of power, goes right on to the mark. 
Let me tell you a story given me by the late ven- 
erable James Mott, of Philadelphia, whose uncle, 
fifty years ago, discovered the island in the Pa- 
cific inhabited by Adams and his companions, 
as you have read in the story of " The Mutiny 
of the Bounty." I was talking with him one 
day about it, and he said that, after staying at 
the island for some time, his uncle turned his 
vessel homeward, and steered directly for Bos- 
ton, — sailing as he did from your own good city, 
— eight thousand miles distant. Month after 
month the Crave craft ploughed through storm 
and shine, keeping her head ever homewards. 
But as she came near home, she got into a thick 
fog, and seemed to be sailing by guess. The 
captain had never sighted land from the time 
they started ; but one night he said to the crew, 
" Now, boys, lay her to ! I reckon Boston har- 
bor must be just over there somewhere ; but we 
must wait for the fog to clear up before we try to 
run in." And so, sure enough, when the morn- 



200 



WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 



ing sun rose it lifted the fog, and right over 
against them were the spires and homes of the 
great city of Boston ! So can men go right 
onward over this great sea of life. The chart 
and compass are with them ; and the power 
is with them to observe the meridian sun and 
the eternal stars. Storms will drive them, cur- 
rents will drift them, dangers will beset them j 
they will long for more solid certainties ; but by 
noon and by night they will drive right on, cor- 
recting deflections, resisting adverse influences, 
and then, at the last, when they are near home, 
they will know it. The darkness may be all 
about them, but the soul shines in its confidence j 
and the true mariner will say to his soul, " I will 
wait for the mist to rise with the new morning ; 
I know home is just over there." Then in the 
morning he is satisfied ; he wakes to see the 
golden light on temple and home. So God brings 
him to the desired haven. 

Now John was one of those right-on men. 
With the sort of power, above all others, to be 
ruined if any suspicion of impurity could be made 
to cling to his name, living in a community 
where any handle for such suspicion would be 



WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 201 



hailed as a providence to destroy his influence, 
he held on in his own severely pure, strong life, 
from the country parsonage to the block ; and the 
most malicious in all Jewry never whispered the 
possibility of a stain. Had there been a crevice 
in John's armor, Herod would have found it out 
and laughed at him ; but in the presence of that 
pure life, that deep, conscious antagonism to sin, 
that masterful power, won as a soldier wins a 
hard battle, this man on the throne was abased 
before that man in the prison. Herod could mus- 
ter courage to face a partial purity ; but a whole 
man was to him what the spear of the angel was 
to the vile thing whispering at the ear of the first 
mother. It changed the possible fitness of na- 
ture into the positive deformity of hell. There- 
fore Herod feared John. 

Then the third root of power in this great man, 
by which he mastered a king, — by which he be- 
came a king, — lay in the fact that he was a true, 
clear, unflinching, outspoken- preacher of holi- 
ness. There are diverse ways of trying to reach 
the soul that has sunk down into sin and sen- 
sualism, as this soul of Herod had sunk. Some 
preachers reflect the great verities of religion, 



202 WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 

as bad boys reflect the sun from bits of broken 
glass. They stand just on one side, and flash 
a blaze of fierce light across the eyes of their 
victim, and leave him more bewildered and irri- 
tated than he was before. Such a one is your 
fitful, changing doctrinaire, whose ideas of right 
and wrong, of sin and holiness, of God and the 
devil, to-day, are not at all as they were last 
Sunday ; who holds not that blessed thing, an 
ever-changing, because an ever-growing and ripen- 
ing faith, but a mere sand-hill of bewilderment, 
liable to be blown anywhere by the next great 
storm. Then there is another sort of preacher, 
who is like the red light at the head of a railway 
night train. He is made for warning ; he comes 
to tell of danger. That is the work of his life. 
When he is not doing that, he has nothing to do. 
I hear friends at times question whether this man 
has a divine mission. Surely, if there be danger 
to the soul, — and that question is not yet decided 
in the negative, — then he has to the inner life a 
mission as divine as that of the red lamp to the 
outer life. And I know myself of men who 
have turned sharp out of the track before his 
fierce glare, who, but for him, had been run 



WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 



203 



down, and into a disgraceful grave. But the 
true preacher of holiness, the real forerunner of 
Christ, is the man who holds up in himself the 
divine truth, as a true mirror holds the light, so 
that whoever comes to him, will see his own 
character just as it is. 

Such a man was this who mastered a king. 
His soul was never distorted by the traditions of 
the elders, or the habits of " good society/' as it 
is called. On the broad clear surface of his soul, 
as on a pure still lake, you saw things as if in a 
great deep. He had no broken lights, for he 
held fast to his own primitive nature, and to 
his own direct inspiration. He did not need 
much lurid fire, though he used it sometimes; 
but he was essentially a child of the day, and 
realities shone when he stood near them. Men 
needed but to come near him, and they saw just 
what they were. And so, as he stood by the 
Jordan, crying, "Repent ye, for the kingdom of 
heaven is at hand," the merchant came, and 
went away resolving to rectify that false entry 
at the customs ; the farmer went home and shifted 
the old landmark back again, so as to restore the 
few inches he had cribbed so cunningly the week 



204 WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 

before last ; the soldier determined to pay that 
widow for her care ; the publican said to himself, 
" From this time forth I will take a true tax, and 
no more, as the Lord liveth ; " and Herod came, 
as the English queen came to the mirror when all 
her beauty was turned to ashes, and the sight 
was an intolerable horror to his soul, so that he 
could bear to look no more. Had John held only 
the broken lights of mere optimism before the 
soul of this simple king, or come to him with a 
message deriving its power from the last read- 
ings of the Talmud, or even the Prophets, Herod 
would have snapped his fingers in his face and 
laughed him to scorn. But there stood the man 
as God made him — deep, calm, pure, clear; 
touching in his earnest words the roots of 
things ; saying honestly, " Herod, this deed about 
thy brother's wife is a piece of vilcness ! Thou 
shalt not take her ! " So, though he still cleaved 
to his sin, Herod saw his soul as the queen saw 
her face scarred and netted with bad passions, 
and he was terrified at the vision of himself. 

I tell you it is no matter what you may come 
to be, as the result of your true and honest life. 
Men may revile you, and cast you out; but 



WHY HEROD FEARED JOHN. 205 



through it all, if you are true to God you shall 
feel that there is a life of the soul that pales all 
other in its exceeding glory. John may be in 
the prison, with his poor garment of camel's hair, 
and with the headsman waiting for him outside ; 
but he is blessed beyond all telling, compared 
with Herod in the palace, with slaves to watch 
his merest nod. For the one has even now 
breaking upon his soul the glory from that 
great city where the Lord God is the light ; the 
thick walls of cloud are already lifting before the 
morning sun ; he knows the home lies just over 
there. But the other has only .a leap in the dark, 
after a life in the dark, with dark faces in the 
dark all about him. My friends, endure hardship 
like good soldiers. Ye shall reap your reward.. 



MARRIAGE. 



The most sacred relation of humanity is that of 
husband and wife. They stand for more than 
father and mother, or parents and children, be- 
cause they are the fountain from which these 
relations spring; and, changing the mere man 
and woman into these sacred names, makes that 
a glory which were otherwise a shame. 

According to the Bible, it is a relation as 
old as our human history ; and nothing outside 
of the Bible, that I know of, contradicts this 
testimony. Other old books cast the matter into 
other forms, as they themselves are the product 
of other races ; but the whole story looks like 
this, when it is told, that in the beginning the 
divine power made man and woman, and set 
them on the throne of the world, and gave them 
from the first the grace to be husband and wife, 
to find in each other the counterpart and com- 
pletion of their own being. 206 



MARRIAGE. 



207 



While the creation over which they were given 
dominion followed its special instinct, and sought 
its lair or made its nest, there brought forth its 
young, and before another spring knew them for 
its own no more than if they were on another 
continent, this husband and wife made them a 
home, reared a family, were steadfast not for a 
few months, but for a lifetime, to those that were 
born of their body ; sent them out in due time, 
to do as they had done, but still counted them 
and their children as an intimate belonging of 
the old homestead ; and so this human race has 
never evened itself with the beasts that perish, 
except as it has become lower and worse. It 
is husband and wife wherever you find them — 
he the weapon-man and she the web-man, as the 
old Anglo-Saxon Bible translates those words of 
Jesus, where he says, " Have ye not read that 
he which made them at the beginning made 
them male and female — he the weapon-man, 
she the web-man ; he the defender, and she the 
clother ; he the warrior, and she the weaver ; 
each indispensable to the other, and both in- 
dispensable to the whole." 

The divine alchemy, if I may use the word, 



208 



MAERIAGE. 



that transmutes the man and woman into hus- 
band and wife, is marriage. It always has been 
so, and no doubt always will be. . The observ- 
ance of marriage as a ceremony is a very dif- 
ferent thing in different countries and times j 
ranging all the way from the custom of the 
Australian black, who beats the maiden he will 
take until she is insensible, and then carries her 
off to his hut, to the pure and simple ceremonial 
used in the best Protestant communions. In 
the grossest savagery, marriage is, as a rule, as 
rude and brutal as possible. As we rise in the 
true scale of life it takes a nobler and better 
form, and on the summits of life it is a sacra- 
ment, and the most awful sacrament, perhaps, we 
can ever take, and the most certain, if we take it 
unworthily, to bring damnation. But from the 
rudest and most brutal savage, to the truest 
American, marriage, — the loftiest and best, as I 
believe, on the planet,- — it is always, in some 
sense, the same thing that is done in this union. 
It turns the man and woman into husband and 
wife, creates the beginning of a home, insures a 
true and welcome identity between parents and 
offspring, binds life together between one gen- 



MARRIAGE. 



209 



eration and another, and out of the kingdom 
of Nature helps to bring the kingdom of God. 
" For marriage/' Bishop Taylor says, " like the 
bee, builds a house, and gathers sweetness, la- 
bors, and unites into societies and republics, 
keeps order, exercises many virtues, promotes 
the general interest of mankind, and is that 
state of good to which God has designed the 
present constitution of the world." 

Marriage is a divine institution, because there 
is a divine reason for it in our life. So, when 
Jesus said, "A man shall leave his father and 
mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they 
twain shall be one. What God, therefore, hath 
joined together, let no man put asunder ; " it 
was the sequel and conclusion to what he had 
said a moment before, that God had made it so 
in the beginning. A true marriage is, therefore, 
always a religious act in itself, because religion 
means the binding of one to another, whether it 
be on *earth or in heaven, in a true and pure 
union. So the Scriptures never command this 
relation; they only recognize, and bless, and 
guard it. Everything seems to be settled once 
for all, from their own beautiful and holy vision 
14 



210 



MARRIAGE. 



of it, when the man wakes before the fall, sees 
the woman that God has brought to him, recog- 
nizes her as a part of his very self, takes her to 
his heart, and God is there as the witness, and 
blesses them. 

Marriage, in the Bible, stands forth as a divine 
fact, rather than a divine commandment : it is 
intimately one with onr creation. The blessing 
of God is already within that on whifck the 
minister calls the blessing of God to descend. 
To a true wedding of two human souls and lives 
nothing can be added but religious ceremonial 
and the proper social safeguards. The man and 
woman, in a true wedding, become husband and 
wife, because their Creator made them for each 
other, just as much as he made Adam and Eve 
for each other, and brought them face to face, as 
he did in Eden. And so when it is really true to 
those who take part in it, the good old-fashioned 
Quaker wedding is nearest the truth of God, in 
which the man and woman declare, as the ground 
of their union, that they have been moved to 
this deed by the Holy Spirit. That declaration 
not only brings the Lord to the marriage, but 
makes him also the match-maker ; and it must be 



MARRIAGE. 



211 



for this cause, in its measure, that so large a pro- 
portion of the Quaker matches turn out well. 
But every true match is made in heaven ; and all 
true men and women who believe this, and act on 
it, find something of heaven in their match; so 
that John Brown of Haddington was not so far 
wrong when he felt the time had come for him to 
enter the holy estate, and that he had seen the 
woman the Lord had made to be his wife, and 
went to tell her so ; and the good soul knew what 
he had come about, and was just as sure as he 
was that she was meant for him, and he for her. 
Yet he said, " My dear madam, you know what I 
am going to say ; but, if you please, before 1 say 
it, we will ask a blessing." And that was what 
they did. 

It is the experience of all times, and no doubt 
of all peoples, that men and women are made for 
each other, to be husband and wife, and are very 
often brought together by a providence they can- 
not account for, and they can never be separated in 
their souls any more. A young man goes into a 
room of an evening, with a heart as free as an 
unmated swallow, and comes out of it sixty min- 
utes after a captive for life ; and the maiden 



212 



MARETAGE. 



knows what the youth knows, and in her heart 
says amen to the revelation, though it may take 
her some time to say it with her lips. I have a 
friend, a man of great intelligence, who told me 
that when he was in the middle of the Pacific on 
a voyage, he saw a face in a dream, and it was 
borne in upon him that this was the face of his 
wife. He went through many adventures after 
that, was away about seven years, came back, 
went home, went to a quarterly Quaker meeting 
in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and there saw in 
a Quaker bonnet, for the first time with his hu- 
man eyes, the face he had seen in his dream. 
The maiden became his wife ; and I never saw a 
happier pair on the earth, or a sweeter home or 
children ; and I have *no doubt of the perfect 
truth of the story. All true marriages are made 
in heaven. 

" All true love is blessed with reverence, 
As heavenly light is blessed with heavenly blue." 

Any true observation of the life we are living 
will bring the assurance that marriages of this 
sort are by no means so few as cynics and sat- 
irists would like us to infer. If from thirty to 



MARRIAGE. 



213 



forty years of intimate observation, in two widely 
separate sections of society, — two worlds, and 
the intimacy of a minister beside, — can be of 
service in forming an opinion, it is mine that a 
great preponderance of the men and women who 
become husbands and wives, find their helpmates, 
their matches, the one human being they need to 
make up the full measure, so far, of their life, in 
the man or woman they marry. 

It is probable they may not find what I may 
call their ideal man or woman — the wonderful 
person the romances can make so much better 
than the Lord of life makes us, as the pictures in 
a fashion-plate are finer than the portraits of the 
masters. When we form our taste on this sort 
of standard, we are likely to be disappointed, and 
ought to be. 

It is possible, too, for many reasons, that in the 
truest match which the Lord himself can make, 
there will be times when the husband and Avife can- 
not see eye to eye, or make one music of the bass 
and alto in which they plighted their trothi It is 
extremely probable if a man cannot always feel 
satisfied with himself before he is married, he 
will not always feel satisfied with his wife after j 



214 



MARRIAGE. 



and if she sometimes charges herself with folly 
when she is a maiden, she may do the same now 
and then by her husband when she is a wife. If 
my self-love cannot hide or extenuate what is 
wrong in myself always, it must be a very tender, 
and holy, and everlasting love that will steadily 
overlook what may be wrong in another that I 
only love as well as myself. I know of nothing 
in the structure of this universe, or in life, or in 
the Bible, that can bear me out in the idea that a 
doubled possibility of happiness, in the addition 
of another life to mine, ought not to bring just 
that much more trial also : twice the felicity im- 
plies twice the infelicity in every other direction. 
The most exquisite organization is always ex- 
posed to the most appalling pain. 

This possibility of falling out is in some way to 
be expected then ; in what way, we cannot well 
foresee, and it is not best we should. It may be 
health, or temper, or habit — it is no matter ; there 
must be trial of our faith in each other, as there 
is of our faith in God, and some doubt now and 
then of each other's love, as "there is now and 
then of the diviner love of Heaven. No man or 
woman has any business to enter into this inti- 



MARRIAGE. 



215 



mate oneness of life and soul without such an 
expectation. When the lark soars and sings over 
a mountain tarn, his shadow is as deep in the 
water as his soaring is high in heaven. Wise old 
Bishop Taylor says, " Marriage has in it less of 
beauty than a single life, but more of safety. 
It is more merry, but also more sad. It is fuller 
of joy, but also of sorrow. It lies under more 
burdens, but is supported by the strength of 
love, so that these burdens become delightful." 

Something like that is to be expected in the 
very nature of things; it is to be found as 
the shadow cast by the truest and purest light 
that ever shines in a home. The sweetest wife 
that ever lived has said things to her husband 
scores of times that she would allow no other 
human being to say about him, or, once for all, 
that third person must hear a piece of her mind, 
if it were in a prayer meeting ; and the truest 
husband will now and then make his will known 
to his wife in tones so imperious, that, if he heard 
another utter them to the same woman, it would 
bring him leaping, like a leopard, at the scoundrel 
who dared to speak so to the mother of his chil- 
dren. 



216 



MARRIAGE. 



"Jack," we said to our journeyman when he 
had been down home once, "Jack, what is the 
matter with thy head ? " " Going past such a 
cottage," Jack said, sheepishly, " I heard the wo- 
man scream. I knew he was not over good to 
her, and I thought that was too bad. So I rushed 
in, and got hold of him, and was trying to get 
him down, and then the wife hit me." 

It was an illustration, from a range of life 
among the Yorkshire hills, that was little better, 
thirty years ago, than savage, of a principle that 
holds good in the sweetest and best of the land, 
where the uttermost hurt is a sharp word that is 
repented of and forgiven the moment it is spoken. 
Husbands and wives, when they are wise, under- 
stand and act up to it, as the condition of being 
what they are, and bear and forbear within all 
fair lines and limits. 

With these elements in marriages, and forming a 
part of their very structure, my observation con- 
vinces me that the true match is the rule. In 
the overwhelming majority of instances, those 
that came to be husband and wife were made to 
be husband and wife. Very often in the face of 
our sins and follies, by the tender mercy of God 



MARRIAGE. 



217 



and not at all by our deserving, the great gift is 
given that makes a heaven for us where sometimes 
we would have made perdition for ourselves ; and 
sometimes the blessed life comes of honor and 
truth, life-long, in those that are made one in it ; 
but to believe that disappointment and misery 
come of the majority of marriages, is like be- 
lieving that in this world the devil has domin- 
ion over most souls. 

John and Mary sit in their home, and wonder 
how Thomas and Susan manage to make so brave 
a show of their small stock of esteem. Thomas 
and Susan shake their heads now and then about 
John and Mary. But you find that somehow 
within it all there is better with the worse, as 
there is worse with the better. Yery tender and 
true are they all when sickness smites them; 
very sorely they weep together over little graves. 
And then, if they must part, and one goes to the 
long home and one stays in this, whatever they, 
who are left to mend the poor broken life, may do, 
is well done, if they do it modestly and truly, and 
it has the blessing of the Risen One upon it. But 
then, in that case, it is always one more in a heart 
made larger to hold one more, never one cast 



218 



MARRIAGE. 



out to make way for another. The match made 
in heaven is never unmade. 

It is quite true, however, that with all this, 
there is a great deal of trouble in this land of 
ours, not to speak just now of other lands, rising 
directly out of this relation of husband and wife 
— trouble that does not lie, or cannot be brought 
within the lines I have tried to draw, but breaks 
out and flames up before the world, draws the 
attention sometimes of a community, and some- 
times of a nation, connects itself not seldom with 
some dreadful tragedy, and compels us to ask 
what we can be coming to, and whether there is 
not to be a complete disruption of the old social 
order, — liberty running into license, love driven 
from her throne by lust, and this new land of 
promise put to shame, and brought to ruin by the 
vileness that destroyed the old. 

It is very clear that here is something for all of 
us to ponder who have children coming up, who 
must take their chance with this growing trouble ; 
may be smitten by it as certainly as other people's 
children are smitten now, — God pity them; or 
whether we have children or not, for all of us who 
love their land, and nation, and God and his truth, 



MAERIAGE. 



219 



and the commonwealth of the world. It is natu- 
ral, and must be useful, I think, to try to find 
where the reason lies for these appalling evils, 
that do not merely threaten us, but are on us ; and 
whether plain and well-meaning people can use 
these reasons, either for prevention or cure, or 
what cure there may be for this great trouble that 
seems to grow and spread as we are looking at it. 

Is it not possible .for a man and woman to make 
sure when they marry that they are to be true 
husband and wife at the cost of the usual pains 
and penalties that will always insist on their own 
payment, and ought never to be thought unrea- 
sonable ? Is it not possible to make this natural 
and beautiful law of our life all but universal, that 
for the man there is a woman, and for the woman a 
man, who will be a true counterpart ? and that they 
shall know it, or else know they can never marry, 
because; without that, the license and minister's 
blessing are the merest farce that was ever acted. 
I cannot but believe there is such a safeguard — 
a true light, that lighteth every man who will fol- 
low it — at)out this, as there is about truth, and 
honesty, and justice, and honor. I believe we 
can hardly make a mistake, except we insist on 



220 



MAERIAGE. 



doing it, about this most essential thing in our 
whole career. When marriage brings misery, 
as a rule, it is not by providence, but by improvi- 
dence, and we suffer in that for our sin very 
often in something else. 

And I would venture to name this, as the 
first reason why troubles come that can never 
be fairly met, and very worthy men and wo- 
men get so badly mismated, — that the whole 
habit now of young people, as they see each 
other with any thought of ever being husband 
and wife, is the habit of semi-deception. They 
set themselves to deceive the very elect, by 
always putting on an appearance, when they 
are in each other's company, that is no more 
true to their nature, than the noble uncle is 
true they see on the stage, who flings his 
thousands about as if his banker's balance was 
a splendid joke (as it is), and then goes home 
and scrimps his wife and children of their 
barest needs. 

In the more simple life of the country, where 
marriages are made that generally turn out 
well, the man and woman know each other inti- 
mately. They go to school together,, and singing- 



MARRIAGE. 



221 



school, and apple-bees, and huskings. The man 
knows the woman's butter, and bread, and pies, 
by much experience ; and the woman the man's 
furrow, and swath, and seat on horseback ; and 
as for temper, have they not fallen out and made 
up ever since they could run alone ? 

But in time we rise in life, and move from 
the farm to the city, exchange the kitchen for 
the drawing-room, linsey-woolsey for silk, and 
blue jean for broadcloth. The young gentleman 
comes in his Sunday best, and takes the young 
lady to the concert ; walks home with her from 
church, and stays to tea ; admires her touch on 
the piano, and her opinion of Mrs. Browning ; 
and she, his superior air, and whatever beside 
may take her fancy, including, very often, his 
report of the money he makes, and can make ; 
and that is really all they know of each other, — ■ 
and that is less than nothing, and vanity. God 
forgive them ! It is a game of cards, in which 
it is of the first importance to both not to reveal 
their hands ; but the revelation is made at last, 
and they find that both intended to cheat, and 
did what they intended. 

Of all the things needed now to make a true 



222 



MARRIAGE. 



and happy marriage, it seems to me that hon- 
esty, reality, and a sweet and simple intimacy, 
are the first. There is a conventional prudery 
about our young people, which must be as bad 
as it- can be. If the young woman is making 
bread when the bell rings, and the servant says 
it is Mr. Cypher, there is a rush to the dressing- 
room to put on a silk and a simper ; and Mr. 
Cypher probably smells of cloves. I tell you 
this is wicked, and false as hell. I wonder 
things are not worse than they are. Young men 
and women must come as near as possible, in all 
pure, innocent ways, to that intimacy with each 
other before they marry which they must come 
to after, or they have no right to expect good 
to come of their evil. u Young women make 
nets instead of cages/' Dean Swift said. If he 
had not been an ingrain villain in his relation to 
women, he would have added, "and young men do 
that also." It is bad on both sides. One of the 
greatest evils leading to the greatest of all, is 
this total want of frankness and honesty each 
to the other, in those that must one day be one. 

Great trouble comes again out of the mistake 
that always has been made, and I suppose will 



MARRIAGE. 



223 



be for a long time to come, that the attraction 
that ends in wedlock is an outer rather than an 
inner fitness. A winning face and form, though 
there be nothing within, count for more, with 
great numbers, than the sweetest graces of the 
mind and soul. So one marries a doll and an- 
other a dolt, to find in a year or two that they 
have made a mistake life will not be long enough 
to. repent in and get righted. There is no in- 
timate and ultimate fitness in a man and woman 
to make them husband and wife except the 
fitness of mind and character. Beauty will 
always be an attraction, and it always should 
be : God has ordained it so. And somewhere in 
this world, for the beauty that is merely in form 
and feature, there is always somebody who will 
rejoice with joy unspeakable, and never repent ; 
and great beauty not seldom goes with great 
goodness. But in this most solemn transaction 
to which two human beings can come, all these 
questions are swept aside, and wait for the 
question of fitness to be settled first. Are these 
two the counterparts, not of dark to blonde and 
the underline to the overline in stature, but of 
thought and feeling, of habit and tendency of 



224 



MARRIAGE. 



life and soul? because, as a rule, these we can- 
not alter, any more than we can alter decimals. 
That is what the Lord means when he bids 
the man and woman seek each other for hus- 
band and wife. 

Then again, I will venture to say, the truest 
wedded life can only come out of the truest 
unwedded life. It is blank folly to imagine that 
a woman who has had half a dozen affairs of the 
heart, as they are called, can wed a man who 
has sown his wild oats, and make a happy match 
of it. " Who shall ascend into the hill of the 
Lord ? Who shall abide in his holy place ? He 
that hath clean hands and a pure heart, who hath 
not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn 
deceitfully." You say, that means the merchant 
and the politician, and the man and woman who 
would experience religion in the purest and loft- 
iest sense. I say it means a fitness for a true 
wedding, as certainly as any other thing we can 
think of. There is no reaeh in our life in which 
these great first things can be more essential, 
either for this world or the world to come. I 
will enter into no particulars : you know all these 
as well as I do. You can say it is seeing life ; 



MARRIAGE. 



225 



I say it is seeing death : it is building a closet 
to hold a skeleton in the Holy of Holies. 

Purity and truth, as absolute as that of the 
angels of God, each to the other, from the day 
you plight your troth to the day you die, are also 
imperative ; not in deed alone, but in thought 
and word ; and not only towards others, but in 
your own most intimate life. There is a forni- 
cation of the eyes, Jesus says; and leaves us 
then in no doubt about his meaning. He means, 
that men and women may see each other's beau- 
ty and grace with eyes full of reverent admira- 
tion, and that shall be a blessed sight to them ; 
or they may look on the same sight with eyes 
full of lust, and then their hearts are set on fire 
of hell. There need be no more sin beside that 
evil glance ; there is fornication from that moment 
in the substance of the soul. I touch no im- 
possible mountain-peak of purity when I tell . 
you this. I stand among sweet home places, 
where the best men and women live the truest 
wedded life to be found on this planet, and the 
only life the husband and wife can live wor- 
thily. 

And then this one word more. The wife is 
15 



226 



MARRIAGE. 



still placed by law and custom on the footstool, 
while the- man is on the throne. It is all wrong ; 
and the time is coming when they shall " sit 
side by side, full summed in all their powers." 
Until that day dawns on the world, we must 
keep its morning star shining through our own 
windows. That wife is the rare exception who 
does not bear a full half of the burden, and as 
good Mrs. Payser says in the story, " Earn one 
quarter of the income and save another." It is 
the simplest justice, when she does this, to give 
her, not one' third, but one half of all that is left 
when we are through. The truest thing to do, 
if the husband dies first, is to leave everything 
to the wife, exactly as the wife, if she dies first, 
leaves everything to the husband. Every will 
should be drawn in that way, as the last expres- 
sion of our mutual love and trust. I have read 
wills made in this city, by men who died in the 
odor of sanctity, over which I should think the 
devil would chuckle, so true they were to the 
constitution of his infernal kingdom. 

A pure life,' from the day we become respon- 
sible to the moment we are revealed to each 
other ; a frank and open communion from that 



MARRIAGE. 



227 



day to the wedding; loyalty, purity, and patience 
mingling with our love from that day onward, 
and this true expression of our perfect trust 
from beyond the grave, — these are the things 
that go to a true wedding, a true home,, and a 
blessed home life. 



XL 



CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 

Luke ix. 47, 48 : " Jesus took a child and set him by him, 
and said unto them, Whosoever shall receive this child in 
my name receiveth me ; and whosoever shall receive me re- 
ceiveth him that sent me." 

It is very goad to me, in reading the Bible, to no- 
tice how much of the interest and hope of the world 
is made to depend on the children that are unborn 
when the hope springs up, resting far away in the 
future, but sure to come when God will, and to 
bring with them some great blessing and help. 
The world moves on through the ages, and the 
generations come and go, each bearing its own 
burden, and fulfilling its own destiny ; and to 
every one there is allotted a certain share of 
disappointment and sorrow, and the failure of 
hopes and expectations. But like a strain of 
clear, quiet music running through a tumult of 
clashing discords, the promise of the children to 
be born, who shall do what the fathers failed to 
do, runs through the generations, from Adam 

228 



CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 



229 



to the advent of the Holy Child. And when at 
last this child is born, and has passed through his 
wonderful career, and dies on the cross, so strong 
is the conviction that it is in the birth of the babe, 
not' the death of the martyr, that the deepest mean* 
ing is hidden, that the new era, the year of our 
Lord, as we call it, dates from the manger, and not 
from the cross ; and then, though the preponderant 
weight of the church seems constantly to have 
been cast into the balance for Easter, and though 
twenty books have been written and twenty ser- 
mons preached about Calvary to one about Beth- 
lehem, they have never as yet disturbed this 
steady human instinct that has left Easter to the 
church, and taken Christmas into the home ; has 
replied with a carol to every sermon, and in- 
sisted that the greatest day of the two was that 
on whose morning the stars shone right on a 
stable, and the angels sang about " Peace on 
earth, and good will to> men " because a babe 
was born, and was sleeping, as they sang, in 
that rude, dark place. 

This, I say,, is a remarkable quality in our Bible. 
It is no less so as a fact in this common life to 
which the Bible is a perpetual index and inspira- 



230 CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 

tion. What was true in that old world, is still 
true in the new. The hope of humanity, the prom- 
ise of the world to come on this planet, rests in 
the children. When the Spartans replied to the 
king, who demanded fifty of their children as 
hostages, " We would prefer to give you a hun- 
dred of our most distinguished men," it was 
only an expression of the everlasting value of 
the child to any commonwealth and to every 
age. They had been defeated, but their hope 
was that the children would conquer. They 
had done their best, but their children, they 
hoped, would do better. Sparta would rise 
again from the cradle and the nursery. The 
new hands would do the new work, and the 
fresh hearts receive the fresh inspiration ; and 
so, in the hope that still shone for Sparta, fifty 
children were of more value than a hundred 
fathers. It was a truth which every age has, in 
some way, to learn. The great hope is always 
in the new birth. It is in the next new life that 
God hides the next new thing the world needs 
for its use. The time comes when great dis- 
coveries stop short of their consummation for 
want of a new man, and no more new discov- 



CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 231 



eries are made. When the church is certain to 
fail for the need of a new apostle to refresh the 
old truths or to announce the new ; when the 
great movement that began with one reformer, will 
thin out like the circles on the water if it cannot 
be taken up and carried on by another, and when 
no new reform can find a man to storm us with 
great burning words and stand for it, — length of 
life and weight of wisdom can never do it. When 
a great man dies, and a nation weeps for his un- 
timely end, if we had but faith like a grain of 
mustard-seed, we should grow glad again, through 
our tears for a timely beginning. 

" Mortals cry a man is dead ; 
Angels sing a child is born." 

The hope of mankind is not in the old life so 
much as in the new birth. If the Marquis of Wor- 
cester had lived even down to the days of Watt, 
nobody believes he would have added " Watt's 
steam engine " to his century of inventions. 
Franklin, at eighty-five, was as far, or farther 
than ever from inventing Morse's telegraph ; Ser- 
vetus and Priestley might have lived as long as 
Methuselah did, and they would never have done 



232 CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 

the work of C banning or Parker, of Wilberforee 
or Garrison, or Elizabeth Fry, or Lucretia. Mott. 
"What shall we do ? " the nation cries ; " our gr-eat 
men are dying out." It is not in the hundred dis- 
tinguished men, but in the fifty undistinguishable 
children, that our hope lies. This preacher has 
got almost to the end of his tether; but there is 
a three-year-old child standing on a stool preach- 
ing to a-three-year-old audience, who will win the 
world to a sweeter and nobler gospel in that very 
pulpit. All posterity stands before us in the 
presence of the children now in their cradles, or 
in the deep mystery of Providence towards which 
the world is always looking; and every genera- 
tion begins the history of the world anew. 

Now this, if I can see into the thing at 
all, must be the deepest reason that can be 
given for the unspeakable loyalty and reverence 
for .children that so constantly filled the heart 
and life of Christ. He would teach us in this 
way to reverence this promise that lies in them, 
as we reverence God, because within it is 
folded all that is most glorious and good in the 
future. It seems to me, as I watch how the heart 
of Jesus is drawn to children, and how his arms 



CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 



233 



are drawn about them, that he is always saying 
to us, " It is not only for their innocence, for 
their faith and trust, and for the heaven I see in 
their eyes, I do this, but because I know that 
within them, as the germ within the seed, and the 
seed within the earth, lies the whole future har- 
vest of blessing to mankind ; " and I think if he had 
been on earth to hear that Swedenborgian say 
one Sunday lately, that the New Church of God 
on earth began in 1757, he would have replied, 
My friend, that is now a very old church, the 
new church begins now. Into a stable or a pal- 
ace, the eternal Providence, to which you trust 
so clearly, has sent a child who will tell the new 
truth and found the new church again to-day, 
because the new church is not that which will 
garner' the bones of a dead prophet, but that 
which will faithfully work out the will of G-od, 
as it is announced in these very moments by 
the prophet of the new time. I never said of 
Moses, what I now say of this little one, " He that 
receiveth him in my name, receiveth me, and he 
that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me," 
because the hope of the world rests not in the 
sepulchre, no matter what may be its beauty 



234 



CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 



and splendor, but in the nursery, though it be 
a stable. 

I have tried to open this doctrine to this light, 
because I want now to consider some things that 
belong to it, as the branch belongs to the bole 
and the flower to the root. 

If it be true then that the hjope of the world lies 
in the cradle, not only that our life may go on at 
all, but that it may constantly reach upward to- 
wards nobler and better things, in what relation 
do we, who are now responsible for this new life, 
stand to it ? and, as it is intrusted to our care, how 
do we deal with it? If to receive a little child 
in the name of Christ is so awful and sacred a 
thing, that when I do so I receive in some 
wonderful way Christ and God together into 
my home and heart, what am I doing about it ; 
how much do 1 believe of it ? Is the child and 
its childhood a very common and common-place 
thing, so that I am subjecting it to my conven- 
ience first, and then to all my whims after ? or is 
it so great a matter that, like Israel with the 
ark, only the most sacred hands can be laid on it, 
and things done for it as it rests within and 
encloses the light and the shadow of God ? And 



CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 



235 



in saying this, I must fail of the first shred of the 
faithfulness that ought to stand like a wall of fire 
about every pulpit and preacher, if I did not 
here call attention to the outcry that is raised 
on all sides of us about the danger that is now 
threatening this nation through the baleful de- 
crease in these blessed gifts from God that are 
the hope and treasure of the world, and in whom 
the fairest hope of this nation ought to rest. I 
need not say what a difficulty I encounter in touch- 
ing on this matter in any way ; I cannot tell you 
how impossible I have found it to put my mean- 
ing into words. But it is my advantage that I 
speak as unto wise men and women, who need no 
words of mine beyond this hint. I speak for 
that, however, which ought to give any man 
courage who has to deal with these sacred things 
in our- life, when I say, that wherever this sin 
may hide itself, and under whatever name it may 
hide, the reason for it is no better than is, I be- 
lieve, usually given. Then there is a word to say 
about it which goes deeper than that of the physi- 
cian, the political economist, or the patriot. It is, 
that in some awful sense we refuse to receive God 
into our hearts and homes when hearing this 



236 CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 

voice saying to us, " Whoso will receive one of 
these little ones in my name, receiveth me, and 
he that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent 
me ; " we break down the footway by which the 
divine nature was trying to cross over to us, and 
then think that somehow we have circumvented 
Providence. Foolish and vain then, as foolishness 
and vanity is our belief in Trinity or Unity ; we 
may have the name of God, but we have put God 
away. Worthless as chaff our profession of re- 
. ceiving God in Christ ; he stretched out his 
hands then, but we would riot hearken. Let us 
pray, " Thy kingdom come " — we have barred 
its coming to the best of our ability, and if it 
come now, it will be in spite of us. 0, friends, 
bear with me, you that are spotless, and let me 
speak, for there may be guilt somewhere, that my 
word and God's word may startle. I tell you, 
when this unspeakable offence is done to Heaven, 
the worst possibility is not what we may have 
taken from the measure, but from the hope, and 
joy, and fulness of life. It is, that in some way, 
we cannot even imagine, we may have made the 
whole world poorer by what we have done. 
What loss to this world, if once such a sin had 



CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 



237 



been hidden away in Stratford-upon-Avon, or in 
the poor clay biggin two miles from Ayr in 
Scotland, or in the hut eight miles from New- 
castle in England, or in many another place 
shielded and shrouded then, as our homes are 
now, but since then lifted up among the shining 
points of the world ! It may be that it needs 
be such offences will come, but woe unto that 
man by whom the offence cometh. 1 could wish 
no worse hell for my worst enemy, if I ever 
take to bad wishing, than that one should haunt 
him in eternity, who might have come and 
poured a. mighty treasure into the commonwealth 
of the world, but for that sin that kept him out 
of it. But I leave this painful possibility for 
the great positive truth of what is folded in the 
child and his childhood, and what we are to do 
about it. 

And this must be said first, that if we are wise 
and faithful to our trust that have them, there is 
in each child the making of a man or a woman 
who shall be a blessing and be blessed. Men and 
women who shall add their mite to the wealth 
of the world, if it be but to smite with the ham- 
mer, or to stand at the wash-tub, and open a way 



238 CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 



by their faithfulness over one talent for the trust 
of two or ten. It is not for us to make our chil- 
dren great, but we all can do a great deal towards 
making them good. The divine ordination . that 
will give to one one talent, to another two, and 
to another ten, it is not ours to control ; but the 
Holy Spirit that will make the future man or 
woman faithful over that which they have, will 
be sure to come in answer to the prayer which 
is first a longing, and then a wise and loving 
endeavor that it shall be so. Great influences, 
which we cannot understand, stretching over 
the whole span of human life, will make one man 
as great as a Mariposa pine and another as small 
as a dwarf pear ; yet in its degree this shall be 
as good as ^hat, while the sun will shine, and the 
rain fall, and the blessing of Heaven rest on 
both. A wise and witty writer has said, that it 
is about equal to being canonized to marry into 
some families ; but Jesus said, " Whosoever shall 
receive one of these little ones in my name, 
receiveth me, and he that receiveth me, receiveth 
him that sent me;" and then saying not a word 
about which little one he meant, or what family it 
would come from, he left the sweet faith undis- 



CHILDEEN AND CHILDHOOD. 239 



turbed in every mother's and father's heart, that 
their own little ones can bear with them this best 
blessing as surely as any others, anywhere. The 
possibility, however, is that the little one may be- 
come not only good but great ; goodness of itself 
may be greatness, as it was in Washington and 
Lincoln ; or there may be greatness without good- 
ness, as the vast catalogue of mighty men who 
have been the scourge and curse of the race can 
testify. But greatness and goodness in men like 
Chalmers and Channing among the preachers of 
this century, and others in every walk of art, and 
literature, and life, — these combine greatness and 
goodness together, and then they reach the loft- 
iest place on which a man can stand. 

This, fathers and mothers, is the deeper possi- 
bility which gathers about the children that have 
come to you from God, and bring God when 
they come into your home and life. They may 
be not only good but great — great and good 
together. Yet this is the hidden mystery that 
only God himself can reveal, as he reveals him- 
self in the children he gives us. That small 
hand, tireless in mischief, cutting and hammering 
at things until you are distracted, may be then 



240 



CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 



and there feeling its way towards some achieve- 
ment in the arts that shall lighten all the burdens 
of life, and give man forevermore a new advantage 
in his strife with nature. There may be a surgeon, 
or a singer, or a preacher, or a painter, or a man 
deep and wise in science, or in government, or in 
the comprehension of mind or matter ; or a wo- 
man in this better time that is dawning for woman, 
whose path shall be as the sun, shining more and 
more unto the perfect day, — these may be among 
those little ones coming up about you in the 
home, or whom you are teaching in the school, till 
you are so weary at your task sometimes that 
you hardly know what to do. This is the clear 
certainty, that besides the regular rank and file, 
— the men who are- always needed to work in 
the common day of the world, — -there must be 
mighty men in the new generation, as there have 
been and are in this. Preachers that shall win the 
world to hear them ; reformers who shall storm 
it ; statesmen who shall be its great ministers, and 
poets who shall be its chief singers, = all the men 
and women who are needed to make the next age 
greater and better than this, — and it will take no 
small pattern in anything to do. that ; — these are 



CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 



211 



all coming through your homes ; they are in their 
cradles, or waiting on the holy law of God for 
their time to be born. And they will come quietly 
into the world, in cities and backwoods, in the 
mansion and the cabin, and in the cabin more 
than the mansion, for the first-born sons of God 
always seem to take to the stable and the manger. 
Then in some way they will at last begin to give 
hints of the greatness with which they come 
invested. None will know it except their mother; 
and she will not understand it, but like Mary, she 
will ponder over it, and hide these things in her 
heart ; then the day will declare it, and these 
great ones will take their place among the immor- 
tal men and women of the earth. But whether 
they will be great and good together, or only 
good ; able to win the world, or only able to 
cultivate a little patch of its soil and raise 
some chickens ; if we will receive them in the 
name of Christ, we receive Christ in them and 
God also. 

Now what is it to receive a child in the name 
of Christ ? In answering this question, I want to 
affirm that it would need no answer, had there not 
been so many mistakes made about this simple, 
16 



242 



CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 



natural, and beautiful truth ; if one man, and set 
of men and dogmas did not insist that every 
child is- wholly defiled by sin : needs to be puri- 
fied in the atoning blood ; to experience a change 
of heart ; and be as soon as possible subjected to 
the torture that is called by these teachers " get- 
ting religion." The first time a father, lost in 
this delusion, looks on his sleeping babe, there is 
this shadow on its face cast by the defilement he 
believes in. So to him to receive the little one 
in the name of Christ, is to subject it to all the 
troubles which come in the train of the father's 
black foreboding ; it is to be continually told , of 
its depravity, until, perhaps, at last it believes in 
it ; to be made a bond slave of the- Sabbath, and 
of long prayers and longer sermons ; and then at 
last, either to break away in desperation or be 
born again, by which change in children, good as 
it is in men, I often observe they leave behind 
them everything that is most natural and beautiful 
in their childhood, and, in giving themselves to 
God, wrench themselves away from all that one 
thinks God would love to see in children, if we 
may judge what he loves by the way he guides 



CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 



243 



and inspires nearly all the children he has sent 
into the world. 

With another, to receive a child in the name 
of Christ, is to subject it to an endless round of 
outward appliances ; of catechisms, confirmations, 
and prayers said at stated times and in a stated 
way, until the sweet, warm life takes the form of 
the mould into which it is so carefully cast, and 
loses the beautiful fashion it brought from heaven, 
in getting ready to go there ; as if in some other 
country a man should train his children for a 
future life in this republic, in which a certain 
self-command and power to meet all emergencies 
man-fashion, are indispensable, should fit them for 
this life by training them to the drill and pipe-clay 
of Austria or Russia. Indeed, this doctrine of 
what it is to receive a child in the name of Christ, 
is, I think, almost endlessly mistaken ; while the 
true way lies open before us all, and is so clear, 
that if we were not pre-occupied with these other 
ways, I do not see how we could possibly mis- 
take it. 

For, if you will remember for a moment that 
double name by which, or by one of which, 
Christ was always known while he lived in 



244 CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 



the world, — the Son of Man, as he called him- 
self, and. the Son of God, as others often called 
him, — you will see at once this one true way that 
instantly closes all other ways whatever. For to 
receive a child in the name of Christ, is just to 
receive it in both these names, as the Son of Man 
and the Son of God ; and then, accepting this fact 
that there, as it lies in the cradle or runs through 
your house, is a being bearing in its life this 
human and divine nature together ; that it is 
your child, and the child of God ; treat it as it 
becomes you to treat a being holding such a 
glorious inheritance ; believe in the treasure that 
has come to you in this earthen vessel, and value 
it as it deserves ; then that will be to receive the 
child in the name of Christ. It is first to receive 
the child as you would have received Christ him- 
self, if your home had been selected as the one 
into which he should be born, and you had known 
what grace and glory was folded in the sleeping 
babe, and then to receive it as your own life 
back again, — the life of God and your life 
together ; this to open out to the sun and wind 
of this world, and that to reach upward towards 
the better world from which it has descended 



CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 245 

to bless you, — The Son of Man, and the Son of 
God both, and both together ; earth and heaven 
hidden in that crib in your chamber. 

And so we come directly to the sight of two 
clear principles in our conduct toward these little 
ones ; one is, that we shall guide and govern with 
our best wisdom and love the son of man, the life 
that is of the earth, earthy, the first man, as Paul 
calls him ; and the second is, that we shall guard 
and reverence, with a faith and trust as great as 
we ever put into our worship of God, the Son of 
God, the life that is from above. I remember 
Harriet Martineau tells how, when she had grown 
to be quite a girl, a little one was born into their 
home ; and as she would look at it, and ponder, 
not knowing what was to come of it, she got 
a terror into her heart that the babe would 
never speak or walk, or do anything she could do ; 
because, she said, How can it, seeing that it is so 
entirely helpless now ? But she found, when 
the right time came, the feet found their footing, 
the tongue its speech, and everything came 
along in its own time ; and then, instead of the 
babe, she had a brother who was able to take her 
part, and teach her things who had taught him. 



246 CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 



I presume it is her brother James she describes. 
And so the babe becomes an illustration, when 
he came to manhood, of the hidden greatness and 
goodness I have spoken of, together. But what 
I mentioned this for, was the illustration it gives 
of a very common latent fear in the hearts, not of 
sisters so much, as of fathers and mothers, that 
the life that has come to them, and is their life 
over again, will not scramble, or grow, or wrestle 
into its own place as theirs has done. They have 
no adequate belief in the hidden man folded away 
within the small frail nature, and that this man 
will walk among men, and talk with them as a 
man, and so they spend the better part of their 
time in trying to order afresh what our wise 
mother Nature has ordered already. This "is all 
a mistake, every time. Make sure that the child 
will walk upright ; that it has fair play to grow 
into a man or a woman, with as good guidance 
and as little interference as possible. Have faith 
in the Son of Man in the child, and if you are 
aware that there has been sin and folly in your 
own life, guard this new life as well as you can 
from the consequences of that sin and folly, and 
then you may be sure that there is quite as 



CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 247 



good a hope for the little one as ever there was 
for you. Give it freedom and fresh air, and all the 
teaching it can stand, without exhausting life in 
getting knowledge, and then trust the rest to 
God, as your fathers did before you ; and if I 
know anything of the way of life, there will be a 
better chance in this new world and new time 
than there has been for yourself. 

The guardianship of the Son of God in your 
little one is, perhaps, a deeper and more sacred 
matter ; but it is all summed up in a word. Do 
whatever a father and mother may do to reveal 
to the child, not his baseness, but his holiness ; 
not that he must be depraved, but that it is im- 
possible he shall not be good and noble. When 
Dr. Arnold went to Rugby, the school was in a 
frightful condition, and it was considered clever 
and manly to do the basest things, and then to 
deceive the master about them. Arnold never 
for one moment appeared to believe he was being 
cheated. He said, practically, " Boys, I will not 
believe in your depravity ; " and then presently 
the boys were all saying, " What a shame it is to 
lie to Arnold, when he always believes you ; " then 
the man's faith in them burnt up all the faithless- 



24S CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 

ness in their hearts. Believe in the presence of 
God in the child, I say ; and if you find you must 
do it, you may believe in the presence of the devil, 
too ; but you must not, and cannot, believe in his 
masterhood. 

When I was in New York once, I received 
a letter, together with a book, from a lady, a 
member of the Society of Friends. I found the 
book to be the Life of Isaac T. Hopper, I suppose 
one of the noblest men in his way this country 
has ever known, and in nothing more wonderful 
than in his perfect love, and trust in peace and 
good will as the true gospel of Christ. But the 
first chapter of the book is taken up with a re- 
cital of the deeds of mischief done by Isaac 
when he was a child. It is one of the most 
extraordinary chapters of childhood I ever read. 
The way that little fellow would astonish the 
good Quakers who came to see his folks, was a 
marvel. His pranks with pins and twine, and 
even gunpowder, cannot be told ; not a doubt 
but many a friend went away feeling that if ever 
the unnamable incarnation of evil did get bodily 
into a boy, and stay there, that little Hopper was 
the " all possessed." But one thing was steadily 



CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 249 



there through all the wild pranks the lad would 
play, and that was, a certain quick reproof of con- 
science, — the good striving with the evil ; and a 
wise mother was there to believe, as all wise 
mothers do, that what was good was very good, 
and the evil was never hopeless, and by God's 
good blessing on the boy, and her wise and loving 
care, it would all come right ; and so she found, 
at last, they were more than conquerors. So the 
mischief of a child, who was only mischievous 
because he had more energy than he knew what 
to do with, became the strength of a man among 
the noblest and best of the good in this age. It 
is but one instance in a thousand of a nature so 
full of life in our own children, we do not know 
what we shall do with it ; yet while we are fret- 
ting and foreboding, but still doing the best we 
can, the unslumbering Providence is, out of 
seeming evil, still educing good: touching the 
conscience when we do not know it; opening 
the new nature, in his own way to the new 
heavens and new earth ; raising up a man to the 
Lord : when Jesus said, " Whosoever receiveth 
one of these little ones in my name, receiveth 
me, and he that receiveth me. receiveth him that 



250 CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. 



sent me/' he made no distinction as to the kind ; 
they were all alike to him; they all held this 
awful and wonderful possibility for the future in 
„ their nature of greatness and goodness. So we 
must welcome little children when they come to 
us as the fresh presence of God in the world — 
the new creation on which, and in which, the 
whole future of the world rests in the love and 
grace of God. 



XII. 



TENDER, TRUSTY, AND TRUE. 

Psalms xxxiv. 11-17 : '* Come, children, listen to me, and 
I will teach you how to serve the Lord. Never say bad 
words, nor what is not true. Go right away from what is 
bad ; do good ; try your best to be gentle and kind. Then 
the Lord will hear you when you cry to him in your trouble, 
and help you every time." 

This sermon, as I said last Sunday, is all for the 
children, and not for the men and women : so I 
have tried to put the text into easy words, so 
that children may know what it means as soon as 
I read it. And I should like to make my ser- 
mon as plain as my text ; then children will 
know what my sermon means too. Sermons are 
divided into three parts. I am not quite sure 
whether a sermon can be a sermon if it is not 
in three parts. At any rate, it is very useful to 
make three parts, for then you can guess how 
much more the preacher will say: and little 
Hattie Collyer told me one day, she was so glad 

251 



252 TENDER, TRUSTY, AND TRUE. 

when I said thirdly ; for she knew then* 1 should 
soon be done. Now, my three parts will be 
three all in one to-day ; and every one will begin 
with the same letter. First, Tender ; second, 
Trusty ; and third, True : and I want in the ser- 
mon to say what will help you to be tender, 
trusty, and true. I am very glad that I have 
found such a nice good text to preach from ; it 
is just what I wanted : and I hope you will take 
care not to forget the text. When I was a boy, 
I had a Bible I could carry to church in my 
pocket ; then when the man said, " You will find 
my text in such a place," as I say to-day, I used 
to find the place, to put a mark in it, and then to 
read all about it when I went home. I wish this 
were done by the children in this school. I can 
tell you, children, it is a real good thing to do ; 
for it will help you to know ever so much more 
than you do know about the best book that ever 
was printed, or it may be that ever will be 
printed, as long as the world stands. Well, now, 
if you read the text when you get home, and the 
psalm too, you will find that King David wanted 
to tell young folks what I want to tell you ; that 
is, first, how to be good ; and then what is the 



TENDER, TRUSTY, AND TRUE. 253 

use of being good. And he does not say, " I 
think so," or, " It may be so," but, "It is so." As 
if he had said, " Now, children, you just trust me. 
I was once a child like you. I am now a man 
and a king. I can see away back to the time 
when I was a little boy, and begged honey from 
my mother, and cried when I didn't get it. I 
can tell just what was good for me, and what was 
bad ; where I came out right, because I began 
right ; and where I came out wrong, because I 
began wrong ; and I want to tell you, so you 
may know what to do. Come, children, listen 
to me." 

I can remember when I was in the Sunday 
school, and had just begun to read about David, 
that I did not feel sure he ever was a real baby,, 
and had to be fed with a teaspoon ; or that he 
ever was a real little boy that went to school as 
1 did, and played marbles, and had to knuckle 
down, and had a peg-top, a jackknife, some slate 
pencils, ever so many buttons, and a piece of 
string, all in one pocket ; that he ever had to try 
hard not to cry when he went to school very cold 
mornings ; or that the teacher spoke sharp to 
him when the little chap had tried his best to get 



254 TENDER, TRUSTY/ AND TRUE. 

his lesson, and did not get it very well. " But you 
know ministers have got to find out all about 
such men as David ; and I have found out enough 
to make me feel sure he was once a little boy, 
just like one of you ; and had to get verses, like 
you ; and didn't like it, like you : that he did not 
like to go to bed early, like you ; or to get up 
early, like you. I rather fear that, in the sum- 
mer, he ate green apples, unripe melons, hard 
peaches, and sour plums, as you do ; and got 
sick, and was very sorry, and had to take medi- 
cine, as you do ; and said he would never do it 
again : and then I believe he never did do it agaiD, 
after he promised not to; which I hope is like 
you also. Now, just here I was trying to see 
what sort of boy David was when he grew 
bigger ; and, as I shut my eyes, and so tried to 
see it all clear, I heard a noise right under my 
study window. This was about four o'clock, 
Friday afternoon ; the schools were out, and the 
children running home. I turned my head to 
see what was the matter, and then I saw what I 
want to tell you. About ten boys were standing 
together. All at once a big boy knocked a little 
boy down, and rolled him in the snow. The 



TENDER, TRUSTY, AND TRUE. 255 

little boy got up, and said, "What did you 
do that for ? " Then the big one drew off, as if 
he was going to do it again ; and I believe he 
would have done it as bad as. before, but the small 
boy walked sobbing away towards home. 

" There," I said, when I had seen that, " I know 
what David never did do : he never struck a boy 
that was no match for him ; he never was a coward 
like that ; for he is a coward to strike a small boy 
so ; and those others are not the boys they ought 
to be, to stand by and see it done." I saw such 
a thing in a picture once ; it was called the Wolf 
and the Lamb. A great, cruel boy meets a small, 
delicate lad who has lost his father, and stands 
over him with his fist doubled, just as I saw that 
boy stand under my study window. I think if any 
boy in this church were to see that picture, he 
would instantly say, " What a shame to use a boy 
so who" is not your match ! " Once I read in the 
Life of Dr. Channing, who was one of the best 
men that ever lived (a great deal better than 
David, because he lived in a better time), 
what he once did when he was a boy, and saw a 
thing like that. . Little Channing .was one of the 
kindest and most tender-hearted boys I ever 



256 TENDER, TRUSTY, AND TRUE. 

heard of. I will tell you a story to show you 
how kind he was, and tender, and true. One 
day he found in a bush a nest full of young birds 
just out of the shell. Children, did you ever 
see a nest full of birds just out of the shell — 
little tiny, downy things, with hardly more feath- 
ers than an oyster? These birds were just so 
when William Channing found them ; and when 
he touched them with his finger, to feel how soft 
and warm they were, they all began to gape, very 
much as you do when I preach a very long ser- 
mon. Well, little Channing knew the birds did 
not gape because he preached a long sermon, but 
because they were hungry. So what did he do 
but run right away, get some nice soft crumbs, 
and feed them ; and after that, every time school 
was out, he ran to feed his birds. But one day, 
when he went to the nest, there it lay on the 
ground, torn and bloody, and the little birds all 
dead ; and the father-bird was crying on the wall, 
and the mother-bird was crying on a tree. Then 
little Channing tried to tell them that he did not 
kill their poor young brood ; that he never could 
do such a mean, cruel thing as that ; that he had 
tried to feed them, and help them along, so they 



TENDER, TRUSTY, AND TRUE. 257 

might fly. But it was no use ; he talked baby 
talk to them as you do to your little sister. They 
could not understand him, but just kept on cry- 
ing; so then he sat down and cried too. Now 
this was the sort of boy Channing was ; and I 
was going to tell you that one day he heard of a 
big boy beating a little one, like that one under 
my window. Channing was a little boy.; he was 
a little man when he was full grown ; but then he 
had a big soul. I was going to say he had a soul 
as big as a church ; but indeed his soul was big- 
ger than all the churches in the world; — and 
when he heard of that, he went right to the boy, 
ever so much larger than he was, and said, " Did 
you strike that little boy?" "Yes, I did; and 
what then?" " Then," said Channing, "you are 
a coward, because he was no match for you ; and 
now I am going to whip you for doing it." Be- 
cause Tie had a big soul, though he was a small 
boy, he went in, and did handsomely ; and that 
was the only time he ever fought in his life. And 
I, standing in this pulpit, honor him more for it 
than if he had never fought at all. Boys, I like 
peace ; I like to see you play like good, true- 
hearted little men. Never fight if you can help 
17 



258 TENDER, TRUSTY, AND TRUE. 

it ; but never strike a boy who is no match for 
you, and never stand by quietly while another 
boy is doing it. Tender and true, boys ; tender 
and true. King David, King Alfred, George 
Washington, William Channing, Theodore Parker, 
more great men ' than I can name, were all that 
sort ; and they came out right because they went 
in right. Brave as lions, true as steel, with kind 
hearts for doves and ravens and sparrows, they 
would never tear birds' nests, or sling stones try- 
ing to kill birds, because they felt as Jesus did 
when he said, " Blessed are the merciful." 

To see David when he was a boy, you might 
think there was not much in him, because he was 
so tender-hearted ; because he would not strike, 
or pinch, or prick with a pin, a boy that was no 
match for him, or take his jackknife, or split his 
top, or spoil his kite. But look out for a tender- 
hearted lad. I tell you, he can flash, and strike 
too, when the right time comes. Why, just look 
at this very David ! One day, when he had grown 
big enough to stay with the sheep, there came 
along a bear, and another day a lion ; and each of 
them seized a lamb, and was making off with it. 
Now, what do you think that boy under my win- 



TENDER, TRUSTY, AND TRUE. -259 

dow would have done if he had been in David's 
place ? I believe he would have run away, and 
left his sheep. What did David do ? I will tell 
you. He had a staff, you know, made out of good 
sound wood, with a crook at one end and a spike 
at the other, and both times he made after the 
wild beast ; gave him, I suppose, the hardest 
knock he knew how to give with the crook, and 
then fought him with the pike. There was a 
soldier, living only six miles from our house when 
I was a boy, who fought a Bengal tiger once in 
India with nothing but a bayonet, and killed him 
after a tremendous struggle. I guess David had 
a hard time with the lion and the bear: but 
he says the Lord helped him ; and I have no 
doubt he did. I believe the Lord helped little 
Channing to fight that big bad boy in Ehode 
Island, because Channing was on the Lord's side ; 
and you know that the hymn we sing so often 
after sermon says, — 

" He always wins who sides with God; 
To him no chance is lost." 

Which is just as true as gospel. 

Well, then, there is another thing I want to 
say. These men I mentioned were not only good 



260 . TENDER, TRUSTY, AND TRUE. 

and kind, and true as steel, but, when they said a 
thing, you might be as sure it was true as if you 
had seen it twenty times over. I think David 
did sometimes get into mischief. I suppose he 
spilled the milk once; but I am sure, if he did, 
he did not blame the cat. I guess he tore his 
jacket rambling after olives ; but if he did, I 
know he did not say a big boy tore it as he came 
home from school. I think he had to take a 
whipping now and then : if he had, I believe he 
just stood up, and took it like a man. This, 
children, this being true is a great thing. If 
you ask me which is worse, to be cruel to small 
boys and kittens and birds or to tell a lie, I really 
could not tell you. Now I think it is this, and 
then I think it is that : they are both as bad as 
bad can be. And now I want to tell you a little 
story of a little boy who was all three — tender 
and trusty and true ; and then I will be through 
with my sermon. 

Away off, I believe, in Edinburgh, two gentle- 
men were standing at the door of a hotel one 
very cold day, when a little boy, with a poor, 
thin, blue face, his feet bare, and red with the 
cold, and with nothing to cover him but a bundle 



TENDER, TRUSTY, AND TRUE. 261 

of rags, came and said, " Please, sir, buy some 
matches ? " " No : don't want any/' the gentle- 
man said. " But they are only a penny a box," 
the little fellow pleaded. " Yes ; but you see 
we do not want a box," the gentleman said again. 
u Then 1 will gie ye twa boxes for a penny," the 
boy said at last. " And so, to get rid of him," 
the gentleman, who tells the story in an English 
paper, says, " I bought a box. But then I found 
I had no change : so I said, * I will buy a box to- 
morrow.' 1 0, do buy them the nicht, if you 
please,' the boy pleaded again. ' I will rin and 
get ye the change ; for I am verra hungry.' So I 
gave him the shilling, and he started away ; and 
I waited for him, but no boy came. Then I 
thought I had lost my shilling ; but still there 
was that in the boy's face I trusted, and I did not 
like to think bad of him. Well, late in the even- 
ing, a servant came, and said a little boy wanted 
to see me. When he was brought in, I found it 
was a smaller brother of the boy that got my 
shilling, but, if possible, still more ragged and 
poor and thin. He stood a moment diving into 
his rags, as if he was seeking something ; and 
then said, ' Are you the gentleman that bought 



262 TENDER, TRUSTY, AND TRUE. 

the matches frae Sandie ? 1 1 Yes.' 1 Weel, 
then, here's fourpence oot o' yer shillin'. Sandie 
canna come : he's no we el. A cart run ower him, 
and knocked him doon, and he lost his bonnet, and 
his matches, and your sevenpence ; and both his 
legs are broken ; and he's no weel at a', and the 
doctor says he'll dee. And that's a' he can gie 
ye the noo,' putting fourpence down on the table ; 
and then the poor child broke down into great 
sobs. So I fed the little man," the gentleman 
goes on to say, " and then I went with him to see 
Sandie. I found that the two little things lived 
with a wretched, drunken step-mother ; their 
own father and mother were both* dead. I found 
poor Sandie lying on a bundle of shavings : he 
knew me as soon as I came in, and said, ' 1 got 
the change, sir, and was coming back ; and then 
the horse knocked me doon, and both my legs are 
brocken. And, 0 Reuby, little Reuby ! 1 am 
sure I am dee'in ! and who will take care o' ye, 
Reuby, when I am gane ? What will ye do, 
Reuby ? ' Then I took the poor little sufferer's 
hand, and told him I would always take care of 
Reuby. He understood me, and had just strength 
to look at me as if he would thank me ; then 



TENDER, TRUSTY, AND TRUE. 



263 



the light went out of his blue eyes ; and, in a 
moment, 

■ He lay within the light of God, 
Like a babe upon the breast ; 
Where the wicked cease from troubling, 
And the weary are at rest.' " 

Come, children, listen to me, and I will teach 
you there is but one way : it is to be tender and 
trusty and true. Whenever you are tempted to 
tell what is not true, or to be hard on other little 
boys or girls, or to take what mother has said 
you must not take, I want you to remember little 
Sandie. This poor little man, lying on a bundle 
of shavings, dying and starving, was tender and 
trusty and true ; and so God told the gentleman 
to take poor little friendless Reuby, and .be a 
friend to him. And Sandie heard him say he 
would do it — just the last thing he ever did 
hear ; and then, before I could tell you, the dark 
room, the bad step-mother, the bundle of shavings, 
the weary, broken little limbs, all faded away, and 
Sandie was among the angels. And I think the 
angels would take him, and hold him until one 
came with the sweetest, kindest face you ever 
saw : and that was Jesus who said, " Suffer 
the little child to come unto me;" and he took 



264 TENDER, TRUSTY, AND TRUE. 

him in his arms, and blessed him. And then 
Sandie's own father and mother would come, and 
bear him away to their own home, for in our 
Father's house are many mansions ; and there 
San die lives now. And I think that the angels, 
who have never known any pain, who never wore 
rags or sold matches, or were hungry or cold, 
came to look at Sandie in his new home, and 
wonder, and say one to another, " That is the 
little man who kept his word, and sent back four- 
pence, and was tender and trusty and true when 
he was hungry and faint, and both his legs were 
broken,- and he lay a-dying." And Sandie would 
only find out what a grand good thing he had 
done .when he was right home there in heaven. 
But I tell you to-day, little children, because, 
whether it be hard, or whether it be easy, I want 
you to be as tender and trusty and true as Sandie. 



XIII. 



PATIENCE. 

James i. 4 : "Let patience have her perfect work." 

This apostle, in speaking of patience, intimates 
that it is not a belonging, but a being, a spirit 
separate, in, some manner, from the human spirit, 
as the angels are ; trying to do something for us, 
but only able as we will give it free course ; so 
that his charge to his fellow Christians all the 
world over, to let patience have her perfect work, 
is not so much that we shall do something, as that 
we shall let something be done for us. All the 
help required of us towards patience, is not to 
hinder her working ; then she will do all that is 
needed, in her own time and in her own way, and 
we shall be perfect and entire, lacking nothing. 
So that, when a man or woman says, " I will have 
patience," they speak closer to the truth than when 
they say, I will be patient." To say, " I will be 
patient," has a touch of assumption in it ; to say, 

265 



266 



PATIENCE. 



"I will have patience/' denotes humility. The 
one word means, I will be what I will ; the other, 
I will be what God will help me be. It is as if 
one man said, "I will be learned," and another 
said, "I will have learning." And a very brief 
reflection will enable us to see that the apostle is 
borne out in this happy distinction by the nature 
and grace of things as we see them all about us, 
and by what we feel within us. Patience is not 
there to begin with. It is no inborn grace, like 
love. It comes to us by and by, and tries to find 
room in our nature, and to stay and bless us, and 
so make us altogether its own. 

The first thing we are aware of in any healthy 
and hearty child, is the total absence and destitu- 
tion of this spirit of patience. No trace of it is 
to be discovered in the eager, hungry outcries, 
and the aimless, but headstrong, struggles against 
things as they are, and must be, but that never 
would be for another moment if these young lords 
and kings of impatience could have their way. 
But presently Patience comes, and rests on the 
mother's lifted finger as she shakes it at the tiny 
rebel, and puts a tone he has never heard before 
within the tender trills of her voice, and he looks 



PATIENCE. 



267 



up with a dim sort of wonder, as if lie would say, 
What is that? But if the spirit be really and 
truly with the mother, it goes then to the child, 
and sheds upon him the dew of its blessing. 

Then, in a few years, she looks at him out of 
the face of the old kitchen clock. It seems im- 
possible that this steady-going machine should 
be so impassive, and persist in that resistless 
march ; should not be quick to strike the hour he 
would drag before its time out of the strong 
heavens, or should not delay a little as he sits in 
the circle when the day is done, and dreads the 
exodus, at the stroke of eight, to his chamber. 
Poor little man ! he has got into the old sorrow. 
It. is not the clock, but the sun and stars he would 
alter, and the eternal ways. 

Then, as the child passes into the boy, he has 
still to find this angel of patience. It is then 
very common for him to transfer his revolt from 
the sun to the seasons. If he is in the coun- 
try, he rebels at the slow, steady growth of 
things ; they never begin to come up to his 
demand. It is with all boys as it was with John 
Sterling. His father gave him a garden-bed, to 
till as he would ; and he put in potatoes. They 



268 



PATIENCE. 



did not appear when he thought they should ; so 
he dug them out, and put in something else ; and 
so he kept on digging in and out, all one summer, 
because the things sprouted and bloomed atonce in 
his hot little heart, like Jonah's gourd. It was an 
instance of the whole boy life. Nature can never 
come up to his notion of what she ought to do 
until Patience comes to help him. She shows 
him at last that the seasons must have their time, 
and he must bring his mind and action into accord 
with the everlasting order ; for without that he 
can do nothing. 

But every boy, of any quick, strong quality, 
struggles with things as they are and must be — 
wants to alter them to suit himself. It seems as 
if he had brought the instinct, but lost the mem- 
ory, of a world and life that were just what he 
wanted ; and he cannot give it up until this an- 
gel comes and helps him conform to his new 
condition, and he only minds her at last when 
he feels he must. The only children in whom 
she has her perfect work are those small martyrs 
that begin to suffer as soon as they begin to 
live, and are never released from their pain 
until God takes them to his breast in heaven. 



PATIENCE. 



269 



There is no such patience besides as they show, 
as there is no such pity besides as they win. 

But your big, healthy boy fights it out, hard 
and long j nothing is just as he wants it. Christ- 
mas conies like a cripple, and school, when the 
holidays are over, like, a deer. It is a shame 
cherries and apples will not ripen sooner, and 
figures find their places more tractably, and ge- 
ographies run as straight as a line. He knows no 
such felicity besides as to run to a fire, or after 
a ball, or to burn fireworks, or scamper away 
on a horse. The reason is just that which we al- 
ways give as we watch him, when we say, u Now 
he is in his element." He is striking out, like a 
strong swimmer, on a splendid tide of impatience. 
He hears the mighty waters rolling evermore, and 
deep calleth unto deep in his heart. 

It is easy to see, again, that these habits of the 
child and boy are only the germs of a larger im- 
patience in the youth and the prime. We soon get 
our lesson from the angel about the kitchen clock, 
and the courses of the sun, and the limits of our 
power to make this world turn the other way. 
We learn to come to time, and set ourselves to 
its steady dictation in all common things ; and 
patience, so far, has her perfect work. 



270 



PATIENCE. 



I wonder to see the patience of some children, 
at last, about what they know they have got to 
do and be, in their tasks and strivings. I see 
small girls of ten who might well shame big men 
of forty as they buckle to their lessons, and go 
steadily through them ; and even boys are some- 
times almost admirable ; though the angel of Pa- 
tience must always feel about boys, I think, as 
that man in New York must feel, who keeps in 
the same cage the cat and the canary, and the 
mouse and the owl, with half a dozen more of 
the sharpest antagonisms of nature. Patience 
must feel about boys as that man feels about his 
animals, — that, after all his pains, there is no tell- 
ing what they may do at any moment. 

But if the boy does learn all he ought to 
learn about times and seasons, and tasks and 
treats, and lines and limits, it is very seldom that 
the lesson holds good as he begins the march to 
his manhood, or when he gets there. Patience, 
then, has to teach him deeper things : time still 
says one thing and his desire another, and he 
hungers again for what God has forbidden in the 
very condition of his life. But now it is unspeak- 
ably more serious than it was ten years ago, as 



PATIENCE. 



271 1 



she comes to him and tries to teach him her great 
lesson. She has to remember what myriads of 
young men, strong, and eager, and headstrong as 
he is, have broken away from her, after all, like 
the impatient prodigal in the Gospels, and have 
only come back and listened to her word when 
they had run through their whole possessions ; 
and had to be patient under pain and loss, when 
they might have rejoiced with exceeding joy over 
powers incorruptible, undehled, and of a peren- 
nial strength and grace. 

Fortune and position, weight for weight, with 
what faculty the Maker has given him, is just 
as sure to come to a man in this country as the 
crop to the farmer and the web to the weaver, 
if he will only let this angel have her perfect 
work. The bee does not more surely lay up her 
honey, or the squirrel his nuts in store, enough 
to last until May brings the new bloom, and the 
tender shoots break forth in the woods, than a 
man, with the same temperate and enduring pa- 
tience, can lay up life enough, and all life needs, 
to last him from the time when the frost seals his 
faculties to the new "spring that waits where the 
Lord is the Sun. But what multitudes want to 



1 272 



PATIENCE. 



do, is to trust themselves to some short cut 
across the dominion of the sworn enemy of this 
angel. 

Travellers in India tell -us they have seen 
a magician make an orange tree spring, and 
bloom, and bear fruit, all in half an -hour. That 
is the way many believe fortune ought to come. 
They cannot wait for its patient, steady, sea- 
sonable growth; that is all too slow, as the 
time-piece and garden-bed are to the child; 
they must put the time-piece forward, and that 
will bring thanksgiving, and gather their crop 
when they sow their seed. Patience comes and 
whispers, " It will never do ; the perfect work is 
only that done by my spirit; the magician can 
never bring his thirty-minute oranges to market, 
because they can never nourish anybody as those 
do that come in the old divine fashion, by the pa- 
tient sun and seasons." He gives no heed to the 
wise, sweet counsels ; takes his own way ; and 
then if he wins, finds that somehow he has lost 
in the winning ; the possession is not half so good 
as the expectation : but the rule is, that the man 
who will not let Patience have her perfect work 
in building up his position and fortune, ends bare 



PATIENCE. 



273 



of both, and has nothing but a harvest of barren 
regrets. 

No man, again, comes to middle age without 
finding that this is the truth about all the noble 
sensations that give such a color and grace to 
our life, and are such loyal ministrants to its bless- 
ing, if we can say " No 77 to the enemies of our 
good aDgel when they come and counsel us to 
disregard her ways, to let our passions take the 
bit in. their teeth, and go tearing where they will. 

Twenty years ago last June, when I had been 
a few weeks in this country, I tasted, for the first 
time in my life, an exquisite summer luxury ; and 
it seemed so good that I thought I could never 
get enough of it. I got some more, and then 
some more, and then I found, for the first time, 
I think, what it is to have too much of a good 
thing. I ate, that day, of the tree of knowledge 
of good and evil; and now I care nothing for 
that good thing any more when I taste it. The 
angel is there with his flaming sword, insisting 
that I shall only eat of it out of Eden. It has 
been to me ever since a parable of this deep old 
verity. I disregarded the angel whispering, 
" You had better take care : if vou eat that for a 
18 



274 



PATIENCE. 



steady diet, through a whole June day, you do it 
in spite of me ; the hunger for some more, which 
has been growing all your life, is a pledge that 
the good of this will abide with you as long as 
you live, if you will always let hunger wait on 
appetite." I had no idea of doing that. Impa- 
tience got the rein, and I gathered and ate the 
whole harvest of that good thing between dawn 
and dark. I mention this, because it is one of 
those experiences we all buy at a great price by 
the time we are forty, and then offer to give them 
away to young friends of twenty, but can seldom 
find anybody who wants them. In our youth, it 
is our misfortune, in a great many of these ways, 
to refuse to let Patience have her perfect work, 
and then to rue it as long as we live. 

Every glass of wine, or dram of whiskey, drunk 
by a healthy and strong young man, is an insult 
and injury to this good angel, and makes it so far 
impossible for her to do her perfect work, because 
he is spending ahead of his income of life, and 
bringing a fine power of being to beggary, if not 
to worse than that. He can only get that glow 
and flame at a heavy discount, both of life itself 
and of all that makes life worth living. Patience 



PATIENCE. 



275 



would help him to infinitely finer pleasures from 
her simple and wholesome stores, and they would 
stay with him as long as he lived ; but he will 
not listen to her counsels, and will have none 
of her reproofs ; therefore will she weep at his 
calamities, and mock when his dole cometh. 

This is but one way in which we can make 
this vast mistake through our impatience and 
desire to forestall the good that God will give us 
in his long, steady, seasonal fashion. There is a 
whole world of evils of very much the same sort, 
some more fatal still than the one I have named. 
It is the same thing whichever way we turn. 
Nature says one thing, and desire another. Only 
the perfect work of Patience can make both one, 
and then the result of both is grace. She comes 
to you, young men, as she came to us when we 
were young : some of you will put your life into 
her hands, as some of us did, whose hair is gray, 
and she will lead you forth into peace and joy. 
Some will refuse, and go for a short life and a 
merry oae, and they will get the brevity but miss 
the mirth, and be dead at forty, though for twenty 
or thirty years after they may still remain un- 
buried. Byron was a dead carcass long before 
he went out to the Greeks. 



276 



PATIENCE. 



All this, in all these ways, as it comes to us 
from our infancy to our prime, is only the out- 
ward and visible part of a patience, or want of 
it, that touches the whole deeper life of the 
heart and soul, and makes the most awful or the 
most celestial difference to our whole being. 

This is true, first, of our relation to one an- 
other. The very last thing most of us can learn 
of our relations to each other is to let. Patience 
have her perfect work. Very few fathers and 
mothers learn the secret this angel is waiting to 
tell them about their children until perhaps the 
last is born. It is probable that he will give 
more trouble than any one of the others. If his 
own bent is not that way,, the big margin he 
gets, when we are aware this is really the Ben- 
jamin, is likely to make that all right : we bear 
with him as we never bore with the first. Then 
love and duty were the motive powers ; now it 
is love and patience. We would fain undo some- 
thing now we have done to the elder ones, and 
the young rogue reaps all that advantage ; and 
then the angel, by this time, has had her way, if 
Solomou, with his wicked axiom about sparing the 
rod and spoiling the child, has no more weight 



PATIENCE. 



277 



with us than he ought to have. She has shown us 
what power and grace are under the shadow of 
her wings, and how in each of these little ones 
we have another life to deal with, that is only 
fairly to be brought out to its brave, strong 
beauty, as the season brings out the apples and 
corn. Patience is the only angel that can work 
with love. To refuse her blessing is to refuse 
God's holiest gift, after what he has given us in 
the child's own being. I think the day is yet to 
dawn when fathers and mothers will feel that 
they would rather scourge themselves as the 
old anchorites did, than scourge their little ones ; 
and will not doubt that they, and not the child, 
deserve it, when they feel like doing it. I sup- 
pose there is not an instance to be found of a?, 
family of children coming up under an unflinch- 
ing and unfailing patience and love turning out 
badly ; the angel prevailing with us prevails 
with the child for us, and turns our grace to its 
goodness. The fruit ripens at last all right, if 
we have the grace to let the sun shine on it, and 
to guard it from the destroyer. All the* ten- 
dencies of our time to give children the right 
to have a great deal of their own way, are good 



278 



PATIENCE. 



tendencies, if we will understand that their own 
way is of course the right way, as certainly as a 
climbing vine follows the turn of the sun : all we 
have to do is carefully and patiently to open the 
right way for them wherever they turn. 

Patience, again, must have her perfect work 
in our whole relation to our fellow-men. It is 
very sad to read of the shameful things that have 
been done in the name of Religion, for the sake 
of conformity : how the fagot has burned, and 
the rack has wrung* We cannot believe that 
we could ever do that, and very likely we never 
should ; yet we are, most of us, inquisitors in our 
way, and want to force human beings into con- 
formity with the idea we have of fitness, though 
it may not be theirs at all. 

It is reported that the flitch of bacon at Dun- 
more, in Essex, is hardly ever claimed. It ; s a 
noble piece of meat, you know, always ready, 
with ribbons for decorations, and no little rustic 
honor besides, for the man and woman that have 
been married a year, and can say, solemnly, 
,that their life, the whole twelvemonth, has been 
a perfect accord. Only once in many years is 
it claimed, though to many an Essex peasant it 



PATIENCE. 



279 



must look very tempting. The loss lies in the 
fact that they did not take this angel with, them, 
and make her the equal of love. They imagine 
that love is omnipotent, and can guard them from 
that sharp word. Love very often leads them on 
to it, since love, they know, is justified of love ; 
but when all hope of the flitch is lost, if they are 
true and good, the angel comes, and stays, and 
has her way. If they are neither, it is brute and 
victim, with no hope of even the questionable 
mercy that comes here through the divorce court. 

Want of patience, indeed, apart from the vilest 
reasons, must be the main cause for the dreadful 
rank growth of this evil weed of divorce in our 
social life. There are, no doubt, instances in 
which to be divorced is the most sacred thing- 
men and women can do. Many a woman must 
do this to save her life. She is tied to a beast 
that will crush her to death, and that is her 
escape. And many a man must do it to save his 
soul. It was a woman he thought he was wed- 
ding : he finds the old Greek fable, of something 
with a fair woman's face, but not a woman, was 
true ; and she would drag him down to her den, 
if he could not get free. 



280 



PATIENCE. 



But these are, on botli sides, the .rather rare 
exceptions. Trace the most of these sad things 
to the well-head, and it is want of patience, each 
with the other, that has made all the mischief, 
and what each will call, in their blind fury, an 
infernal temper, is this devil of impatience, which 
has taken the place of the good angel who would 
have saved them if they had welcomed her as 
they ought, and let her have her way. If they 
did love each other once, they will never find 
such blessing as could come to them, with pa- 
tience as the aid to their affections. Human 
souls have an imperial quality in them : a turn for 
insisting on being master; and when they come 
so close together as husband and wife, and love 
recovers his sight, as he will, Patience must take 
up her part, and adjust the thing by a constitu- 
tion of equal rights, and by an equal giving up 
of rights, or, in spite of love, there will come 
infinite trouble. 

We have very much the same thing to learn 
in our' relation to each other in the whole length 
and breadth of our life. Ministers with their 
people, and people with their ministers ; em- 
ployers with their servants, and servants with 



PATIENCE. 



281 



their employers ; men in their dealings with men, 
and women in their judgments of women. We 
would all be very much more careful in what we 
say and do, if, when we pray, we should say, 
" Our Father, give us grace to let thine angel 
have her perfect work, to guide and keep us till 
we reach the line at which forbearance ceases 
to be a virtue : and then, if the storm must come, 
make it like the lightning that cuts its quick 
way through the clogged and dead atmosphere, 
only to restore and bless, to set all birds singing 
a new song, and deck the world with a new 
beauty," — that would be a blessed prayer. 

For, finally, there must be a divine impatience, 
too. Jesus Christ felt it now and then ; but you 
have to notice that it is never with weakness or 
incompleteness, or even folly or sin ; for all these 
he had only forbearance and forgiveness, and 
pity and sympathy. What roused him, and made 
his heart throb, and his face glow, and his voice 
quiver with a divine indignation, was the hollow 
pretence and ugly hypocrisy he had to en- 
counter, and the judgments one man made of 
another out of his from a sense of superior attain- 
ment. That is our right, as much as it was 



282 



PATIENCE. 



his right, as we grow towards his great estate. 
I have seen an impatience as divine as ever 
patience can be ; but this is needed only now 
and then, and can only come safely and truly to 
the soul in which her great sister has her perfect 
work. The perfectly patient man is always jus- 
tified in all his outbreaks. Nobody blames the 
flaming sword, or the quick stroke home that 
comes from a noble forbearance, any more than 
we blame the thunderbolts of the Lord. 

Last of all, for this angel of Patience we must 
cry to Heaven. One of the old pagan kings 
would not let the sage go, who came and told him 
that when passion was like to be his master, he 
would do well, before he gave way, to recite to 
himself all the letters of the alphabet. • The coun- 
sel seemed so admirable, that the king cried, " I 
cannot do without you." It was only a dim pagan 
shadow of the sheen of the patient angel as the 
apostle sees her. There she sits, the bright, 
good servant of the Most High, ready to help all 
who cry to him. The good servant that, through 
untold ages, wrought at this world to make it 
ready for our advent ; laying together, an atom 
at a time, this wonderful and beautiful dwelling- 



PATIENCE. 



283 



place, with all these stores of blessing in mine 
and meadow, mountain and vale ; then when her 
great charge came, she was waiting for him, 
to nurse and tend him, own sister of faith, and 
hope, and love, and twin-sister of mercy ; tireless, 
true, and self-forgetful, anxious only for her 
charge, and never to leave us, if we will let her 
have her perfect work, until, through all hin- 
derance, she leads us through the golden gate, 
over which is written, " Here is the patience of 
the saints ; here are they that keep the com- 
mandments of God, and the faith of Jesus ; " 
then she will have her perfect work, and we 
shall be perfect and entire, lacking nothing. 



XIV. 

TWO MITES. 

Mark xii. 43, 44: "Jesus said, This poor widow hath cast 
more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury : 
for all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of 
her want." 

In speaking to ybu briefly about this little per- 
sonal history, I want you to notice, first, the 
difference between what this widow must have 
thought of her gift, and what the world thinks of 
it after almost two thousand years have come and 
gone. You can see, as you read the passage, that 
the words of Christ were not meant for her, but 
for those about him. He speaks after she has 
gone. It is very probable that she never heard 
of it as long as she lived, and not improbable 
that if she had heard of it, she would have 
minded it no more than any good and regular 
church-member now would mind what was said 
by one whom she considered heretical, dangerous, 
and not to be believed in. So she cannot have 

284 



TWO MITES. 



285 



had the faintest suspicion that her gift would be 
remembered five minutes after it was given, or ; 
if anybody noticed it, that they could possibly look 
at it as any more than the very poor gift of a 
very poor woman ; and yet here it is, in its bare 
poverty, outshining the most generous giving 
the world has ever known. There is nothing 
like it, that I know of, in the Bible or out of it. 
A divine word has made gift and giver immortal. 
There she stands, with her half cent, in the sun- 
light of heaven, as the generations come and go, 
incorruptible, undefiled, and never to fade away. 
Those disciples who were to give us the Gospels, 
caught the words as they were said : " I say unto 
you, this poor widow hath cast in more than they 
all ; for all they did cast in of their abundance, 
but she, out of her want, did cast in all her life ; " 
and they could never forget them if they tried : 
then, when the Gospels had to be written, this 
must go in. It could no more be left out, than 
the great historic ruby can be left out of the 
English crown. Then the Gospels began to be 
read in distant places : Greece got them, and 
Eome, and Egypt, and Spain, Britain, and France, 
and Germany, and wherever they went the wo- 



286 



TWO MITES. 



man went, standing in the splendor of the divine 
words, so millions at last saw, what was seen at 
first by two or three, and still the glory grew : 
your fathers and mine, so long as we can trace 
them, saw what we see ; and when we are dead 
and gone, our children will still see the widow 
standing with her two mites casting them into 
the store of the Lord, and then going back to her 
home, and beginning again, perhaps, to save two 
mites more. We turn over the same great book, 
and read how David and Solomon gathered their 
treasures, and gave them with generous hands for 
noble purposes ; and how the people brought 
their gifts, when their hearts were stirred, and 
gave them freely for their temples and shrines, 
for worship, and patriotism, and charity ; but we 
see nothing like this, — nothing that so touches 
the heart. " She, out of her want, did cast in of 
her life," and eternal life has come to her here on 
the earth ; her giving has been her saving, and 
that half cent has brought millions of money to 
noble uses. 

Again, we must not fail to notice that this 
divine word leaves us in no sort of doubt as to 
the reason why the poor gift should be what it 



TWO MITES. 



287 



was, in comparison with those which were intriiv 
sically so much greater. Men seemed to give 
then, as they still give, with a vast generosity 
for good objects ; and this treasury had two 
great purposes — the care of the temple, and 
the relief of the poor ; both good, and both w^ell 
cared for by the good men and women of that day ; 
and Jesus saw what they gave ; he was watch- 
ing them. It is possible that he had been very 
much interested that day in the whole matter ; 
may have gone again and again to watch, won- 
derfully moved and attracted by this sight of the 
givers and their gifts ; and I think that I can 
see what he saw when he stood there that day, 
and can follow his thought a little way as I follow 
his eyes : the people pass the chest, each is drop- 
ping what answers to each nature, and then pass- 
ing out of sight and out of mind, all except this 
widow. " 

Here comes a merchant ; the times are hard, he 
tells you ; nothing doing, taxes heavy, losses large, 
and things so bad generally, that you have to say, 
What a misfortune it must be to be a merchant ! 
But you have to notice that his chariot is of the 
latest style, and by the best maker ; his robes of 



288 



TWO MITES. 



the finest texture and color; his diamonds of 
the purest water; and, altogether, for a man 
in such hard trial, he looks very well. Yester- 
day, he looked over his accounts ; he will not 
tell you what he saw there, but, certainly, he 
did not seem any worse for the sight. This 
morning, before he goes to his store, he will 
go to the temple ; he will be thankful, to the 
extent of offering a lamb ; and then there is 
a little balance, when all is done, that he 
would like to drop into the treasury. A little 
balance ! but it would buy all that widow has in 
this world, — the hut she lives in, all the furni- 
ture, and all the garments she has to keep her 
from the cold. Yery low the priest, who stands 
by the chest that day, bows to the generous 
gift ; the holy man would be horrified if you 
told him he was worshipping a golden idol, but 
it is true for all that. Then the great mer- 
chant passes on, and you see him no more ; he 
has given out of his abundance; he will not 
need to deny himself one good thing for what 
he has given. If a new picture strikes his 
fancy, he will ask the price, and then say, " Send 
that round to my house ; " he will have his 



TWO MITES. 



289- 



venison all the same, whether it is a sixpence 
a pound or a dollar ; and at the end of the year 
he will have his balance undamaged,, m spite 
of the hard times. He has given out of his 
abundance ; but, considering the abundance, he 
has not given as the widow did. 

Then there comes a lady. You can see that 
she is not looking well, and the w r orld goes 
hard. This has been a hard year for her. She 
has had to give parties, and attend parties ; 
to dress, and dance, and smile when she wanted 
to weep ; and lose her rest, and be a slave 
that the slaves themselves, if they had any 
sense of what she is, and has to do, might pity. 
The season is over, and now she must think 
of her soul, — her poor soul. She must repent 
in dust and ashes ; go to the temple ; give to 
the poor, and to the support of the true faith ; 
and, altogether, lead a new life. It is the most 
exquisite "make up^' of dust and ashes on the 
avenue that morning. She sweeps on in her 
humility, gathering her garments of penitence 
about her, lest even a fringe should touch the 
beggar at the gate. She stops a moment to 
give her gift ; low bows the priest again as she 
19 



290 



TWO MITES. 



passes, and she takes her place among the 
women, and says her prayers, and her soul is 
shriven. May we venture to wateh her back 
to her home, and see the luxury that waits 
her? Is there one jewel, or one robe the less 
for what she has given? or one whim the less 
gratified, when the time for penitence is over, 
and the season opens ? I see no sign of that. 
I never hear her say, " This and that I will 
forego, that T may give." She has given of her 
abundance ; she simply purchased a new lux- 
ury, and got it cheap, and she fades out of sight 
and out of life. 

You see others come with better gifts, not so 
much, it may be, in mere money value, but more 
in those pure eyes that are watching that day, 
not for the amount of the gifts,, but for their 
meaning. A decent farmer follows the fine lady, 
forehanded, and full of industry. His crops 
have done well ; his barns are full ; his heart is 
open. He has come to the city to sell his prod- 
uce ; has sold it well, and is thankful, and he 
will make his offering of two doves in the tem- 
ple, and give something for the sacred cause, 
and to the poor besides, because his heart is 



TWO MITES. 



291 



warm and grateful, and, as he says, he will 
never feel what he gives to God and the poor; 
there will be plenty left at the farm when 
this is given ; and then who knows but that the 
Lord will give a greater blessing next year, for 
does not the wise book say, " He that giveth to 
the poor lendeth to the Lord, and that which 
he giveth shall be rendered to him again " ? 
So it is at once a free gift, and in some way, a 
safe investment. He is glad to give the money, 
and yet to feel that this is not the last of it. 
Very pleasantly the holy man smiles on him too, 
as he drops his shekels and passes on ; he has 
been there before ; he will come again. He is one 
of those fast friends who can always be counted 
on to give while the fruitful fields answer to 
the diligent hand. He is a sort of country con- 
nection to these commissioners of the Most 
High, and will always be received, as he is to- 
day, with grace and favor. 

And very low indeed the good man bows to 
that stately centurion who comes now. He is 
not a member of this church ; indeed, he is not 
a member of any church ; for, like all his nation 
of that rank, he thinks that all churches are 



292 



TWO MITES. 



very much alike, and none of them of much 
account, except as managers of the common 
people. But it is a good thing to keep in with 
them ; there is no knowing what you may want ; 
and so he comes now and then, and looks on at 
the service, tosses his Eoman gold into the 
chest, nods and smiles to the cringing priest, 
and feels that he has done well. 

Then with all these come the good and sin- 
cere men and women, with not much to spare, 
but who make a conscience of giving, and man- 
age to get an education for their children, and 
everything decent ; who never want any simple 
and wholesome thing they need, and are able to 
lay up a little beside for a rainy day ; as various 
as they are now, they were then, who would do 
something for these things which to them were 
so sacred ; and it was when givers like these 
came, that the widow came with her two mites 
— the smallest matter, possibly, that anybody ever 
thought of giving. I think if she was like most 
women, the utter littleness of what she had to 
spare, would be a shame to her ; she would be 
tempted, on the mere ground of her womanly 
pride, to say, " Since I cannot give more, I will 



TWO MITES. 



293 



not give anything : to put in these two mites 
when others are pouring in their gold and sil- 
ver, will only show how poor I am." So it was 
like giving her life to give so little ; and yet 
these two mites that meant so little to the treas- 
ury, meant a great deal to her. They meant 
darkness, instead of a candle on a winter's 
evening ; a pint of milk, or a fagot of sticks, 
or a morsel of honey, or a bit of butter, or a 
bunch of grapes, or a pound of bread. They 
meant something to be spared out of the sub- 
stance and essence of her simple and spare 
living. And this these wise and loving eyes 
saw at a glance. Jesus knew that the two 
mites were all she had ; and so as they made 
their timid tinkle in the coffer^ they outweighed 
all the gold. He saw what they came to, be- 
cause he saw what they cost, and so his heart 
went with the two mites ; and while the holy 
man, who had made such deep obeisance for 
the larger gifts, let this trifle pass unnoticed, 
Christ caught up the deed and the doer, and 
clad them both in the shining robes of immor- 
tal glory. 

And this incident naturally suggests, first, 



294 



TWO MITES. 



that there may be more splendor in some ob- 
scure thing we never stop to notice, and -would 
not care for if we did, than there is in the things 
that dazzle our sight and captivate our hearts. 

We have all had to notice this among children. 
In homes where there are plenty of children, 
there is almost sure to be one who will do things 
that cost the life, run all the errands, make all 
the sacrifices, and bear all the real sorrows, but 
beyond that be a little nobody ; plain, probably, 
and small, not brilliant, never appearing to any 
advantage — if she is of that sex, as very gen- 
erally happens — beside her more brilliant sisters ; 
" a good little thing," the whole family says, and 
takes all the rest as a matter of course, expect- 
ing the service and sacrifice as something that 
comes in the course of nature. This is the two- 
mite child of the family ; the small piece of home 
heroism, of a worth surpassing all the gifts and 
graces of the household besides ; the little one 
that Christ would see if he came and sat down in 
the house, and would call his own ; and while we 
would want to see him notice those we are per- 
haps proud of for their beauty or brightness, he 
would say, " Suffer this little one to come unto 



TWO MITES. 



295 



me, and forbid her not, for of such is the king- 
dom of heaven, — she gives more than they all." 

We notice this again in the church. Some 
naturally attract and win applause by their gifts. 
The eyes of the church are on them ; their Chris- 
tian life is a sort of ovation, a triumphal proces- 
sion, and their ten talents tell wonderfully as 
they ring down into the treasury of the temple. 
Others, again, attract no more attention than this 
widow with her two mites. There is very little 
that they can do, and yet they do that little at 
a cost the rest can hardly imagine. They say 
their poor word, feeling all the while it is so very 
poor that it cannot make much matter, but they 
must say it, for that is their' duty. They do 
their bit of work, and a very poor piece it is, as 
everybody can see ; but it is the best they can 
do, and it has come out of their life. It is their 
sorrow that they cannot do more, but it is the 
joy of heaven they do so much, and they, and 
not the brilliant and talented, are the true great 
givers ; it is the unseen and unnoticed heroism 
of Christian men and women that feeds the fires 
of goodness, and wins the well-done of the Lord. 
Those who have great gifts and graces, and offer 



296 



TWO MITES. 



them generously for sacred uses, are honored and 
blessed, if what they do is done with sweet sin- 
cerity. But it is those who have hut a small 
gift, and give that at a cost the gifted cannot 
measure, whom the eyes of Christ rest upon with 
tte tenderest light, and of whom he says, " These 
give more than ye all." 

And this that is true of the home and the 
church, is true of the whole life we are living. 
There are men who will some day win good 
places in the world, attract attention to what they 
do, win applause and honor for their deeds, but 
who may really be doing better now, when no- 
body knows or notices, than they will do then, 
because what they are doing now demands more 
self-sacrifice than they will ever think of in their 
greater estate. And there are tens of thou- 
sands in this nation, whom we never heard of, 
and never shall, whose deeds, weighed in these 
divine balances that weighed the widow's two 
mites, prove them to be more heroic in the heart 
and soul of heroism than the vast majority of 
those we have sung about and wept over, — the 
brilliant and attractive characters who gave out 
of their abundance., when these did cast in their 
life. 



TWO MITES. 



297 



Then, again, we cannot be in any doubt as to 
what lies at the heart of this word of Christ, or 
what led him to cast that glory on a poor, deso- 
late woman, and give her precedence over not 
merely the pomp and vanity, but the real grace 
and generosity of those who came with her. It 
w 7 as an illustration to him, and. he will make it 
one to us, of this law of our life, that the most 
Godlike deed is that which belongs to the 'sac- 
rifices we make, giving for sacred things and 
causes that which costs us most, and is most 
indispensable, and yet is given back to God. 
Nothing was worth a thought in this poor 
thing's gift but the sacrifice it cost her to give. 
Her two mites were as worthless, for any out- 
side uses, as the smallest coin we can muster 
now would be in this church and in the Citizen's 
Relief Society. The whole worth of it lay in 
that piece of her very life which went with it ; but 
that made the two mites instantly outweigh the 
whole sum of silver and gold cast in by the 
wealthy, which cost nothing, beyond the effort to 
give what a very natural instinct would prompt 
them to keep. They gave of their fulness, she 
of her emptiness ; they of their strength, she of 



298 



TWO MITES. 



her weakness ; they of their plethora, she of her 
hunger ; they of the ever-springing fountain, she 
the last drop in her cup. It was not the sum, 
but the sacrifice that made the deed sublime, and 
set the doer, in her rusty old weeds, among the 
glorious saints and angels. 

Surely this must tell us what it did to these 
that stood by the Messiah. The principle 
now is exactly the same as it was then, as 
certainly as any principle governing matter in in- 
natural laws. The young man may say, " I am 
willing to do my share for sacred causes and 
institutions;" but if he means by that, he will aid 
them after he gets all his parties, and operas, and 
sleigh-rides, and everything besides that his heart 
can wish, — the gift for which he will not deny 
himself the least of these things, must be before 
Heaven less than the least. And the man of 
business may say, " I will help ; the Lord has 
been good to me, I will be grateful ; " if grati- 
tude takes the form of that he can well spare, 
and yet spare nothing out of his life. But after 
he has purchased with the talents God gave him 
as a steward everything for himself that he can 
possibly need, then he really spares nothing, 



TWO MITES. 



299 



makes no sacrifice, gives only out of his abun- 
dance, and is still open to that touch of fear, that 
he may not even be dealing fairly with the Princi- 
pal who has committed the talents to his trust ; 
the fear, which good old brother Cecil used to say, 
always gathers about stewards and agents that 
grow uncommonly rich. So may we all give, 
no matter what we are, a poor selvage out of the 
web in our ample and voluminous robes ; give 
the crusts after we have eaten the dimier ; spare 
in the Lent what we could not spend in the Carni- 
val, — and it will be the same to every one of us. 
The wise all-seeing Eyes will see us, and what we 
are doing, and the angel will write in his book of 
life, " He gave to God and good uses what he did 
not need himself for any uses." Or we may give 
out of the real substance ; but if we do not give 
with a real sacrifice, I have no authority from the 
Lord to "say that the poorest Irish washerwoman 
in this town who gives to the Lord, according 
to her light, her two mites, which make one far- 
thing, gives it out of her life to say a mass, even 
for the soul of her wretched sot of a husband who 
was found dead in the Bridewell, — does not take 
infinite precedence of the best and most generous 



300 



TWO MITES. 



who have all they want, and then do ever so 
nobly out of the rest. 

For, once, more, it is in its own way a piece of 
the grossest infidelity to presume that this inci- 
dent at the old temple gates, that still stands out 
radiant in the light of heaven, was a chance 
observation, which might just as soon have been 
missed as not, and there had been no such 
lesson. Believe me, this cannot be true. The 
conjunction of the great stars is not more inevita- 
ble in the heavens than was this gathering to 
that sight and hearing on Zion. It was no chance 
that might or might not be ; it was in the divine 
order, that we might be left in no doubt about 
this touching and deep-reaching truth. For so 
Gocl will have us learn through his Son and an 
old widow woman who was moved in her poor 
soul to go out that day with her two mites, this 
holy and awful law of sacrifice, as it reaches into 
such things as these, — these common duties of. 
being on the side of God in what we spare for 
the things that build up his cause or aid his 
children. 

It was another lesson, indeed, that we learn, in 
this simple and most obvious way, of that whole 



TWO MITES. ' 301 

world of grace and truth that culminates on 
Calvary. It is sacrifice in its uttermost simplici- 
ty, in words, as it were, of "one syllable, fitted for 
babes in Christ. No more may we presume that 
there is not the divine observation of the human 
action on this lake shore that there was on that 
mountain top. The human eyes of Christ, as 
they looked with such tenderness on that sight, 
these human eyes were but the organisms through 
which God was watching, and the judgment pro- 
nounced when the deeds were done was from 
the judgment-seat of the Most High. So it is 
forever and ever. The divine eyes are watching 
us, with or without the human organism, and the 
words are said about us all sorrowfully when we 
are selfish and small, sweetly when we are self- 
forgetful and self-sacrificing. You may make a 
sacrifice, and feel very sad you could not do more, 
and go " home when it is made, feeling that the 
thing is not worth a thought, and be glad to for- 
get it yourselves, and only to remember the great 
gifts of the rich and generous, yet shall the last 
be first, and the least greatest. You shall say, 
Lord, when did I give two mites which make one 
farthing ? and he shall say, You gave it at such a 



302 



TWO MITES. 



time, and went without such a piece of your life, 
that you might be able ; and these shall say, That 
was when I gave my shekels ; now will the Lord 
surely say, here is a crown of glory, and they 
shall cry out, " See what I gave, what I did at 
that very time ; " and he shall say, It is not here ; 
the angel has not made any record of it ; it must 
have been out of your abundance ; and we never 
reckon here the cup that was filled out of the 
ocean. 

And if you say, we know all this already, 
and you have told us very much the same 
things before, I must still put you back, dear 
friends, on your own inner sense of what is 
right, and remind you of Paul's great word : " If 
thine heart condemn thee, God is greater than 
thine heart, aud knoweth all things." If jour 
heart has nothing to say about your duty to do 
more and to be more, and you know it is alive to 
the work God gives us all to do, then I am dumb. 
I want you only to put yourselves in the line of 
this holy and beautiful thing, this gem in the 
setting of the Gospels, to be sure that your gift 
to God is the gift of a part of yourself in every- 
thing you are called to give. 



XV. 

OLD AGE. 

Phil. 9 : " Such an one as Paul the aged." 

Old age is the repose of life, — the rest that 
precedes the rest that remains. It is the Seventh 
day, which is the Sabbath of a whole lifetime, 
when the tired worker is bidden to lay aside the 
heavy weight of his care about this world, — to 
wash himself of its dust and grime, and walk 
about with as free a heart as a forehanded far- 
mer carries into his fields of a Sunday afternoon, 
at the end of harvest. For " old age should 
be peaceful," Dr. Arnold says, " as childhood is 
playful; hard work at either extreme of life is 
out of place. You must labor in the hot sun 
of noon, but the evening should be quiet and 
cool. It is the holy place of life, the chapel of 
ease for all men's weary labors." 

But it has been the misfortune of old age to 
be generally unwelcome, with some noble ex- 

303 



304 



OLD AGE. 



ceptions among those who can see how nature 
never makes a mistake about time. The aged 
would rather be younger;, and the young admire 
most in the old what they call their youthful- 
ness ; so that, " How youug he seems ! " is our 
finest praise of an old man, and " How old I 
feel ! " is very often the old man's most pitiful 
complaint. 

Now and then we come across a beautiful and 
contented old age, in which those who possess 
it seem to be aware how good that blessing is 
which can only come through a long lifetime, 
and give what their age has brought them. 
Such persons surprise ns that we should ever 
have been content to admire in any old man or 
woman merely their poor traces of youth, while 
what is so much better than youth makes up 
the substance of every well-ripened life. It 
is as if one would persist in admiring the 
shrivelled petals that linger at the end of an 
apple, because they retain about them the dim 
memory of a blossom, and care nothing for the 
fruit that has come through their withering. 

I am not to deny that we can find reason 
enough if we want it for this idea. There is plenty 



OLD AGE. 305 

of evidence, to those that care to hunt for it, on 
the misfortune of growing old, from that outcry 
of the heathen, "Those the gods love die young," 
to the moan of the last man we found weary 
of his life, but loath to leave it. We can see 
sometimes in those who are growing old all 
about us such an isolation, passing at last into 
desolation, and such utter inability to bear up 
against the burden of the years, that we pray 
in our hearts we may be saved from an old 
age like that. Then we remember how Sol- 
omon called these the evil days, when we 
shall say we have no pleasure in them; and 
how a great philosopher wrote in the diary of 
his old age, " Very miserable ; " and we can see 
Milton, sitting in the sun alone, old, blind, stern, 
and poor ; and Wordsworth, walking in his old 
age by . Rydal-water, but no longer conscious of 
the glory and joy of which he had sung in his 
prime ; and a host besides, to whom old age has 
brought, as Johnson said, only decrepitude ; 
and then we say with Lamb, " I do not want to 
be weaned by age, and drop like mellow fruit 
into the grave." We shrink back at our whiten- 
ing hairs, and wonder how anybody could ever 
20 



306 



OLD AGE. 



be so lost to the fitness of things as to call us — 
except in a sort of splendid jest — the old lady, 
or the old gentleman. The child longs for and 
welcomes his boyhood, and the boy the youth, 
and the youth his manhood. But very few and 
far between are the men and women who will 
desire their age. as a servant earnestly desires 
his shadow, or feel that the white head is a 
crown of glory, when they see in their own 
many threads of silver, and cannot hold it up 
for the burden of the years. In the face of this 
unbelief in the goodness and blessing of old age, 
I want to say, that no period of life can be more 
desirable than this, if it be what every old age 
ought to be ; that old age is the best of all the 
ages, when it is a good old age, and it ought 
to be so considered. Such a conviction, as you 
may well believe who are still young, or in mid- 
dle life, can only come fairly through a true 
personal experience ; but this comes of itself : 
that if life be good as bud and blossom, and in 
its greenness, and the days when it is ripening, 
then there is no reason, in the nature of things, 
why it should not be good when it is fully ripe 
and waiting to be gathered. If the soil be good, 



OLD AGE. 



307 



and the sowing, and the seasons, then it is not a 
thing to mourn about that there should be a 
harvest. If the preparation and opportunity be 
good, what is to be said of the consummation? 
Can that be a thing to lament about, to beat 
back, a condition so unwelcome that it is polite 
not to be aware of its presence? I cannot 
believe in such a termination of these great, 
sacred processes of life. If it be a misfortune 
to grow old, it is a misfortune to be born, and 
to be a child, and youth, and young man, and in 
our prime. If the rest of our life is meant to 
be enjoyed, then this must have some better 
meaning in it than to be endured. It must go 
up and stand with the rest, or they must come 
down. Old age is a beautiful consummation, 
or it is a bitter mistake. 

That it is a beautiful consummation, we can 
sometimes see for ourselves, when we meet some 
aged person in whose life there is such a bright 
and sweet humanity, and true love, and restful- 
ness, and grace, that we feel in their presence 
how a good old age must be desirable after such 
a life as all men are called to live in this stormy 
era, when, as the Psalm has it, " They mount 



308 



OLD AGE. 



up to heaven, and go down again to the depths, 
and their soul is melted because of trouble."* 
Then "He maketh the storm a calm, and men 
are glad because they be quiet, so He bringeth 
them unto their desired haven." And we have 
all had to contrast an old age like that with 
another, in which there was no beauty which 
should cause us to desire it ; restless, suspicious, 
hard, and graceless ; that has never abandoned 
its sin, but has been abandoned of it, as the fire 
abandons burnt-out ashes ; whose threescore and 
ten years' experience of the world has only 
gone to confirm their unbelief in it, while they 
still hug it, and dare not let it go, because when 
they peer with their poor, preoccupied eyes 
into the hereafter, they can only feel that " dark- 
ness, death, and long despair, reign in eternal 
silence there ; " and when we ask what can make 
such a difference, we reach what I want espe- 
cially to say, — 

I. How to come to a good old age ; and, 

II. What then ? 

I. And this is to be first, and truly under- 
stood, an old age of any sort, is the result of 
the life I have lived, whatever that has been. 



OLD AGE. 



309 



That above all outward seeming, or even inward 
feeling, is that solid, solemn sentence, " What- 
soever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." 
I can live so well, that at seventy earth and 
heaven together shall say, " I am such an one 
as Paul the aged." Yet from exceeding self- 
distrust, and want of the instant power to trust 
in God, I may not feel this at all, but look back 
on the way I have come, and say, " Better I had 
never been born than to live to so little pur- 
pose." Or I may shake at the impending change, 
at that other life into which the young may go 
soon, and I musL go soon, and say, " I toil be- 
neath the curse ; but knowing not the uni- 
verse, I fear to slide from this to worse." It 
is no matter what I feel, any more than it mat- 
ters that a fruitful summer day shall gather a 
curtain of thick cloud about it as it sinks to 
rest, shutting out the shining heavens, and veil- 
ing all things in the mist. It has been a fruit- 
ful day all the same, and now the substance of 
it is in every grain of wheat, and in the heart 
of every apple within the zone, and its incense 
has gone into the heavens before it, so the fruit- 
fulness abides, and its blessing rises, and the sun 



310 



OLD AGE. 



and moon would stand still, sooner than that 
should be lost. 

On the other hand, my life may have been 
worthless as withered leaves, selfish and self- 
seeking since the day when I cheated my small 
schoolmate swapping marbles ; hard to man, base 
to woman, abject to power, haughty to weakness, 
earthly, sensual, devilish. Yet, in my last days, 
the very selfishness that has been the ruling 
passion of my life., may lead me to grasp the 
delusion that another can bear my sin, and then 
lift me instantly into Paradise ; and the good of 
feeling that the last bargain I have made, and the 
last advantage I have gained, is the best, may 
make me pass out of life, in the euthanasia of 
self-deception, into the pit. It is no matter what 
I feel, what I have done, if my life has been like 
that, it determines what I shall be. Angels, no 
more than men, " gather grapes of thorns, or 
figs of thistles ; " and when they come to the 
gathering because the harvest is ripe, they will 
gather what there is. 

There is one so-called religious tract, once in • 
general circulation, and considered among the 
best, which seems to me to be blank blasphemy. 



OLD AGE. 



311 



It is that remarkable narative written from what 
Burnet wrote of the last days of Wilmot, Earl of 
Rochester, the most profligate man, after his 
master, Charles II., of that era. He was an old 
man, through his vices, at thirty-four, and at the 
point of death was worn out utterly, and his 
mind was also much decayed, as his biographer 
says in the Encyclopaedia. It was then that 
Burnet was called to see him, was attracted to 
him, as the result shows, partly by the pity of a 
noble heart, and partly by the hope of bringing 
so notorious a sinner (who was also an infidel and 
an earl) into the church. The result was, that 
he died, as it is believed, made clean through the 
atoning blood, and was taken straight to heaven,, 
because our Protestantism leaves us no alterna- 
tive but that or hell, and divides the places, and 
hopes and despairs of them, by a razor-edged 
dogma, this way and that. 

Now let me never be suspected of trying to 
limit the infinite mercy. " 0, praise the Lord, 
for he is good, for his mercy endureth forever." 
That Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, has been or will 
be saved, I doubt no more than I doubt my own 
existence. The ultimate fact I do not doubt ; 



312 



OLD AGE. 



the instant application of it, in that way, I utterly 
deny. What ! make that man an angel of light, 
and clean from all sin, there and then, while 
women he had ruined were walking through 
London streets down to hell ! set him singing at 
the foot of the great white throne, without a care, 
while mothers, whose daughters were lost through 
him, were weeping, heart-broken, in their blighted 
homes ! when the whole life of England was baser 
because he had lived in it ! when his poems and 
songs were only just starting out to sow their 
evil seeds through the long generations until 
now ! I tell you that is blasphemy. " Whatso- 
ever a man soweth,, that shall he also reap," 
whether the harvest be gathered here or yonder. 
I get what I give* So, then, what I feel in my 
old age may be a very small matter. Wilmot 
was very happy ; Luther, on the whole, was very 
miserable. He said, that rather than have much 
more of life, he would throw up his chance .at 
Paradise, and felt every day, after he was fifty, 
what such a one as Paul, the aged, meant, when 
he said, u We that are in this tabernacle do groan, 
being burdened.' 7 What I am, is the great thing ; 
the feeling may answer to the factor it may not; 



OLD AGE. 



313 



that depends upon a great man}^ matters that 
never disturb eternal verities at all. 

Now, what I am from sixty to seventy, is the 
sum of what I have been from sixty back to six- 
teen. I have been getting together, letter by 
letter, and page by page, that which, good or 
bad, is now stereotyped, and stays so. Talking 
once with a friend who had been very sick, he 
told me that one remarkable fact in his sickness, 
while he was unconscious of all that went on 
about him, was the coming back of his life like a 
succession of pictures. Things that he had long 
forgotten, that were buried down deep in the 
past, came up again one by one, and were a part 
of himself. It was a dim intimation of what we 
have all been led to suspect from our own ex- 
perience, — that things are not lost, but laid away, 
everything in its own place ; and it is but another 
side of what I have tried to show you by a figure 
— our thoughts and deeds are the words and pages 
in the Book of Life. Slowly we gather them to- 
gether, page by page, and when old age comes 
the story is told. Letters may be missing then, 
and words here and there obscure ; but the 
whole meaning and spirit of it, the hardness and 



314 



OLD AGE. 



falsehood, or the tenderness and truth and love, 
the tenor and purpose of it, are then all to be read. 
It is noble or base. It will inspire or dishearten. 
It may be the life of a king like George the 
Fourth of England, in which there is not a line 
that the world would not gladly forget, or the 
life of a cobbler like John Pounds, who lived in 
the kingdom under that king, and out of his 
poverty lured with little gifts the poorest chil- 
dren in Plymouth to his small shanty, that he 
might teach them to read ; and better things be- 
sides, giving his whole life for their salvation, 
whatever it be. I would not dare to say one 
word of old age before this, — that the most cer- 
tain thing about it is, it is the solid result of a 
lifetime. It is no matter how we may feel who 
have to face it, that is what must abide at the 
heart of it, and be the warp and woof. 

This brings me to say again,, what may seem to 
have been left doubtful as I have tried to state this 
first thing, — that there is a line to be drawn, on 
the one side of which any man may look forward 
to an old age "full of contentment, but on the 
other, if we take it, only of misery. It is that 
line which runs between what inspires the life 



OLD AGE. 



315 



and soul, and what merely exhausts it ; what 
perishes in the doing or the using, and what 
abides forever; the fashion of this world that 
passes away, and the spirit of that which is as 
fresh and full forever, as the sea is of water, or 
the sun of fire. 

There is a dull, heavy book I read sometimes, 
for one great lesson that I find in it — the Life 
of James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine. 
His life opened into sickness, and almost constant 
pain, and such heavy depression of the heart and 
mind, that when he was thirty-four, he writes, " I 
greatly doubt whether the silent mansion of the 
grave is not the happiest place." There, we 
naturally say, if he do not die young, or get into 
his nature some vast compensation of religious 
feeling, is the making of a miserable old man ; or, 
even if he be religious, he may become one of 
that unhappy number we are always meeting, 
who has a great deal of religion, but no rest. 
Well, Scott met him in a company when he was 
in his eighty-second year, and wondered at his 
cheerful presence, and how he was at home with 
everybody about him, talking to every one in a 
select company of the best men in Scotland with 



316 



OLD AGE. 



the keenest interest in what interested that par- 
ticular man. J effrey had seen him a year before, 
and says he never saw him in his life more anima- 
ted, instructive, and delightful. Campbell passed 
a day with him when he was nearly eighty-three, 
and says, " It was one of the most amusing and 
instructive days of my whole life." Another 
writes of this time, that he was telling a Swedish 
artist how to make the best brushes for painting, 
and this lady how to cure her smoky chimney, and 
that one how to obtain fast colors for her dresses, 
and teaching a child how to play on the jews-harp, 
and how to make a dulcimer, and was altogether 
an inexhaustible fountain of interest and instruc- 
tion to all that came to him, and only distressed 
and uneasy when anybody insisted on reminding 
him what a mighty work he had done in his long 
lifetime. 

Now, I ask what made this vast alteration be- 
tween James Watt at thirty-four and at eighty- 
three, and hear some such answer as this : James 
Watt did dutifully what God set him to do on this 
earth, not caring so much for the profit or the 
praise his deed might bring, as that the work 
should be well done. That was one thing. The 



OLD AGE. 



317 



other was, that what he did, though it was only 
the perfecting of the steam engine, he wrought 
for a pure purpose of God, and for the the help 
of humanity. It was a part of that great plan, of 
which the Gospelof Jesus Christ is the perfect 
crown — the glory of God and the salvation of 
men. That glory was only made greater by the 
application of steam, through law, to machinery ; 
and humanity was only blessed by the lifting 
away of one of its burdens. But it was a divine 
work, in its degree, and it brought a divine re- 
ward. So the dutiful life, through sickness, de- 
pression, and pain, brought a restful and noble 
old age, into which, while one by one his old 
friends left him, and he felt his own feet touch 
the chill of the great river, the consolations of 
God came pouring plentifully, banished all fear, 
and made him feel, as one has said, how " age is 
but the shadow of death, cast where he standeth 
in the radiant path of immortality." 

And this is the preparation for a good old age : 
Duty well done, for its own sake, for God's sake, 
and for the sake of the commonwealth of man. 
When a man works only for himself, he gets nei- 
ther rest here, nor reward hereafter. When I 



318 



OLD AGE. 



work for myself, and live for myself, I exhaust 
myself; but when I work for others, wisely and 
well, I work for God too ; and for my work I get 
that bread which cometh down from heaven. 
And duty can find an infinite outcome. It can 
nurse a sick child, or teach a healthy one. It 
can be John Pounds or John Milton. It can 
found the firms and factories, that are the roots 
of civilization, and the schools and churches and 
libraries, that are its life's blood. In all these 
ways, and all others, the preparation for a good 
old age is my duty unselfishly done, trusting in 
God, and living purely. 

II. I said, when old age comes, what then ? 
The preparation for it is a pure life, and faithful- 
ness to duty now. What comfort and advantage 
can come to it, and abide through it, until I die ! 
If I may take such instances as I have met with 
in life, or in books, or have thought of as possible, 
I want, when I come to be an old man, to feel and 
to act something like this : First of all, I will try 
to make the best of it ; not the best of what is bad 
at the best, as some seem to think, but of what is, 
if I will but understand it, the best of my whole 
life, because it is the last. 



OLD AGE. 



319 



So that, if I should be favored then to feel 
clear and strong, and this organism, through 
which the spirit works, shall serve me, I will re- 
member what good there was at eighty-three in a 
man like James Watt, and how Solon said that after 
sixty a man was not worth much, but himself lived 
to be over fourscore for all that, and at fourscore 
did the very best work of his life. I will then 
muster with these all the grand old men, away 
back to such a one as Paul the aged, whose age 
has brought its own peculiar power, and made the 
world glad they were spared so long to be such 
a blessing, and so I will keep on as they did, not 
permitting my best friend to cheat me out of the 
count of my years because I am still active, but 
will carry it all to the account and the advantage 
of my old age, and the blessing that may abide 
in that. 

But if it be otherwise, and long before I have 
to go through the river the eye grows dim, and 
the fires abate, and a grasshopper becomes a bur- 
den, and the tramp a shuffle, and I have the grace 
to see, what people may be too kind to say, that 
my active days are over, and I had better have 
done 5 then I will try to see also how this is the 



320 



OLD AGE. 



best that can happen, because it is the kind, good 
Master taking out of my hand the hammer I were 
otherwise loath to lay down, and putting out the 
fire, in which I should only potter, and waste mate- 
rial, and saying to me, in this good, wise way, " Now 
sit down a while, until it is time to ' go. You 
have wrought long enough. Rest and be quiet." 
And then, please God, I will not break out into 
that shameful lamenting I have heard from old 
men, about "the tender light of a day that is 
gone, that can never come back to me, and 
powers and appetites withered away." 

Perhaps, even, I will rise so high as to thank 
God it is so, and that the passions and appetites 
I have had to watch like wijd beasts sometimes, 
are tamed at last, and I am free to be, in some 
poor measure, as the angels of God. I do think, 
indeed, that such outcries as we hear and read 
about the blight that comes to age in the loss of 
its powers, are as unreasonable and unpardonable 
as anything that can be thought of. I can think of 
nothing nowthat I shall more earnestly desire when, 
as Paul the aged said, "the outward man perishes," 
than that the inward man should be so renewed, day 
by day, as to make me feel there is no loss, but a 



OLD AGE. 



321 



gain, in that, because " there is a building of God, 
a house not made with hands, eternal in the heav- 
ens," where mortality shall be swallowed up of life. 

Then another thing which I want to be sure 
about, when that time comes, is, that the world is not 
rushing headlong into destruction because I am no 
longer guiding it. It may be cause, or it may be 
effect, I can never quite tell which ; but I have 
noticed it is one of the keenest miseries of a rest- 
less old age, that it is quite convinced everything 
is going wrong, and getting worse and worse, from 
the little grandchild, who is not at all what his 
grandfather was seventy years ago, to the vast 
and solemn interests of the nation, going, beyond 
redemption, to ruin. It was this which made that 
misery in Luther's later life, of which I have 
spoken. He was sure the world was given over 
to the Evil One. His last letters speak of life as 
utterly hopeless. " The world," he said, " is bent 
on going to the devil." " It is like a drunken 
peasant." " Put him on his horse on one side, and 
he tumbles over on the other ; take him in what- 
ever way you will, you cannot help hhn." Now, 
the evil with Luther dated back many years be- 
fore this, when he would not trust our common 
21 



322 



OLD AGE. 



humanity in as reasonable a request as it ever 
made, but took the side of the nobles against the 
peasants, and with his own hand tried to put back 
the clock of the Reformation. 

It is one of the qualities of the most restful and 
joyful old age, that it believes in the perpetual 
incoming of the kingdom of our God and of his 
Christ. And so its heart is full of belief and hope 
in the new time and the new generation. " The 
former times," such old men say, u were not better 
than these, and I was not better than my grand- 
son." Like Paul the aged, such an old age is not 
sure it shall see the coming kingdom and power 
and glory, but it is sure it is to come, so that in- 
fancy is to it a perpetual prophecy ; and the old 
man can always take the young babe, and cry, 
"Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in 
peace, according to thy word ; for mine eyes have 
seen thy salvation." It is one of the best bless- 
ings of a good old age, that it can believe in a 
good new age which it has helped to bring in, and 
in which it is permitted to stay for a little while, and 
welcome if. Such a one as Paul the aged is always 
quiet about that. Then I shall hope to realize 
how wonderful is this great, faithful Providence, 



OLD AGE. 



323 



which, since I can first remember, has wrought 
such marvels in the earth ; how men and nations 
are in the hand of God. And while age will make 
my religious ideas so unalterable that, if one 
shall come as directly from God as Christ did, 
with a new Gospel, I shall not be able to give up 
this for that, I shall be able to feel that all the 
differences of good, true men are included within 
the great harmonies of God. 

But all this, and all else, can only come in one 
way. In a wise little book, given me lately, on 
the art of prolonging life, the author says that in 
old age. the system should have more generous 
nourishment. It is the correlative of a truth 
about the soul. Say what we will, — 

" Except we are growing pure and good, 
There can be no good in growing old. 
It is a path we would fain avoid if we could ; 

And it means growing ugly, suspicious, and cold." 

God help us if, as we are growing older we 
do not grow better, and do not nourish our souls 
on the most generous thoughts and aspirations. 

A noble German thinker speaks of his inten- 
tion to store up, for his death-day, whatever is 
best in all he has thought and read. I would not 



324 



OLD AGE. 



wait for that day. I would have my store- ready, 
when, some time after sixty, I begin to feel the 
first chill of the cold waters, and then feed my 
heart on it all the way along to the end. The 
great promises of the sacred books, the faith in the 
fatherhood that was in Christ, the joyful hope that 
rings through great poems, like that of Words- 
worth on Immortality, and Tennyson's " In Memo- 
riam," and this wonderful work of " Jean Paul " 
which I have just mentioned. Then the winter of 
my life shall not be the winter of my discontent. 
I will take a lesson even from the little creatures 
that hide in the woods, that in bright summer 
weather make their store-house, and in the autumn 
lay up their store ; then, when. the storms sweep 
through their sylvan homes, and the frost and 
snow turn the great trees into pillars of ice, live 
snug and warm among their. kind, and wait for 
the new spring. 

" Grow old, then, cheerily; 
The best is yet to be 
The last of life,' for which the first was made. 

" Our times are in His hand, 
Who saith, A whole I planned ; 
Youth shows but half trust — 

God sees all ; 

Nor be afraid." 



XVI. 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 

Isa. lxi. 3 : " Beauty for ashes." 

We gather, to-day, from our great city, in this 
city of the dead, for a noble purpose. It is, 
that the tender grace may rest on us that rests 
on the dust of the men who died to save us ; 
and that we may strew flowers on their graves, 
not so much for a token that we will not forget 
them, as for a sign that they may not forget us. 

It is a good time to meet for this purpose 
just as the spring is passing into summer, and 
the full bloom of the world is about us, to make 
this the symbol of the feeling that is in our 
hearts for those who went forth as spring was 
opening into summer in their lives, and gave 
them to their country. . 

And this fitness in the time is the more 
fitting from, the fact that this day falls on a 
Sunday. It is the first time we have come 

325 



326 AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 

together in this fashion for this great purpose. 
It gives another grace to the rite, that it should 
be done on a day set apart for sacred things. I 
am glad of the beautiful coincidence. It makes 
the day to me still more sacred. Indeed, I 
cannot but feel that it would be a vast advan- 
tage if the time we give to this sacrament of 
the flowers could always be a Sunday. If on 
this holy day we could close our churches with 
one consent all over the land, gather in the 
cemeteries where these heroes rest, and hold 
great services of psalm and prayer, with only 
the arches of heaven for the dome of our 
temple, then we should have a service that all 
would be glad to attend, a church from which 
none would feel excluded, and such a blessing 
as seldom comes to little synagogues, where we 
meet for more private devotion. 

But simply touching this as something that 
I devoutly hope may come to pass, for the good 
of the church and the commonwealth alike, I 
cannot but feel that better still than the time 
is the spirit that brings us together and makes 
us one, as if in this great multitude there is 
one common heart. It is not possible that in 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GBAVES. 



327 



the common reaches of life, there should not 
be a vast difference in the thought and feeling 
of a multitude like this. I think it best there 
should be. The dead levels of uniformity on 
most of the questions that come home to us, 
are the lurking-places of malarias, and only 
the mountain ranges of diversity are the fast- 
nesses of health. But as on this summer Sun- 
day the sun draws this whole green world to 
look up and to drink in his light and fire, so the 
glory that burns and shines in the deeds of the 
men who are resting here, and all over the land, 
and in the sea, draws us as the sun draws the 
world ; and as these men were made one in 
that cause for which they gave their life, we 
are made one in our loyalty to their dust. 
When we come here, — though we have never 
seen the face of one buried beneath these 
mounds, — we gather about the ' graves of our 
brothers and sons. When the youth left his 
home and his mother to defend his country, he 
was adopted by the whole motherhood of the 
republic, and every home- made him one of its 
own. So we cast the flowers on the graves 
of our kindred j and from this low, green hill, 



328 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GEAVES. 



our hearts yearn over the dust of all brave 
soldiers who fought and fell. It is a consecra- 
tion that reaches wherever a man is laid whose 
heart beat for the mighty work God gave us 
to do in this generation. One great, simple ar- 
ticle was their whole creed, — that the American 
Kepublic, just as it was then, was good enough 
to live, and fight, and die for. It is good enough, 
as we gather here, to make us forget all minor 
things in their noble sacrifice, and in our thank- 
fulness to God for raising up such men. They 
died that we might live. They gave their life 
a ransom for many. So it is well that we should 
have but one heart as we meet about their 
graves, 'and speak of their great devotion. 

It has seldom been my lot, in all the years 
of my ministry, to feel so entirely unequal to 
any work I have had to do, as I do to-day. 
As I have thought of the great honor in your 
request that I should address you, I could 
not but feel it was all a mistake to select 
such a man as I am for this work. It is one 
of the touching things that have come to us 
from the old time, that when a man wanted 
to move a great multitude to do some piece of 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



329 



grace, he stood before them and held up a poor 
stump, from which the hand had gone in de- 
fence of their homes. He said no word ; he 
simply bared the maimed limb, and in a moment 
the multitude was lifted into the grace he 
sought. So I have thought you had " better 
have done to-day : not to take me, or any man 
like me, whose work in the strife for which 
these men fell was so poor and thin, but to take 
one of your own veterans, a man who, when 
the trumpet called our nation to battle, went out 
and stood fast, fighting for the land ; who en- 
dured hardness like a good soldier, until the 
war was ended, and then, coming back, quietly 
took his place as a citizen, doing his duty with 
the smart of his old wounds about him, but 
never complaining, or thinking that God had 
given him the harder lot. Such a man might 
stand mute, or simply say, " These are the 
graves of my comrades/' and then no speech 
that could be made by the tongue of man be- 
side would ever touch us with an eloquence 
like that. One mute appeal from a maimed arm, 
pointed down at these green mounds, if we 
had eyes to see what the appeal meant, would 



330 AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 

cover these graves deeper with summer blos- 
soms than they have ever been covered with 
winter snows. Soldiers of the Republic, you 
cannot suspect what power abides in your bro- 
ken bodies and shed blood, to shake the heart 
of every true American. That was the power 
you should have seized for this great occasion. 
I went to the battle-field; you fought on it. 
I nursed and tended in steamboat and hospital ; 
but you wrestled with the agonies of wounds 
I could not feel. God knows my heart was 
always full of sympathy; but that could not 
underreach your pain. All the tales of old 
heroism I had ever read faded out in the face 
of your quiet endurance ; and you taught me 
new lessons of what a man can , do, when God 
helps him, in any strife. The grandest sights 
I shall ever see on this earth I saw in your 
camps and hospitals. It is only my resolution, 
sacred, I trust, as my life, never to refuse the 
request of a soldier, that has held me up to 
stand here, and try to speak to you by the 
graves of your comrades. My advantage, as 
I do try, rests in the infinite eloquence of your 
mere presence. I fall back on your reserves. 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



331 



Mine is the description ; yours, the demonstra- 
tion. I can only tell the things that you and 
yours have done. 

And so it cannot be my business, in the light 
of this confession, to catalogue these deeds as 
the substance of my poor discourse. They 
stand in their own strength, and are enshrined 
in a glory to which my words can add no lustre. 
Neither can I pretend to touch any lesson for 
those that have taken part in these great trans- 
actions. So long as the chaplain falls back 
while the soldier fights the battle, I think there 
is very little room for the chaplain to talk to 
the soldier, either of duty or glory. I was 
at the rear when you were at the front what 
time the thunders and fires of the battle shook 
the common heart. I will not pretend to come 
to the front, and let you pass to the rear now, 
when the battle is over. 

But beside the soldier to-day stands the citi- 
zen, and I have thought that if I could speak 
from the soldier to the citizen, I should do all 
that may become a man in my position. If T 
can do that, I shall be content. 

I want to catch the spirit, if I can, of that 



332 AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 

great time in which the soldier took the first 
place, to feel, through its lurid and terrible 
infoldings, for the divine soul that was in 
it from first to last. Within a few years the 
chemist has found the sweetest dye of heaven 
in that crude oil which springs out of the dark 
and dismal deeps of the earth. This true 
transcript of the sky was born in the heart 
of that darkness. So there is, if we have the 
wisdom to find it, the light of heaven at the 
heart of this old trouble through which we 
have come. And I think we shall find it, if we 
consider three things that touch us, naturally, 
as we think of the men whose dust is buried 
beneath these mounds, and is rising and blend- 
ing with the glory about us, — that they, and all 
like them everywhere, were : — 

I. The true heroes. 

II. The true patriots. 

III. The true saviours of this land. 

I mention the hero first to mark my sense of 
the fact that of these three great things, always 
to be found in the true citizen-soldier, this with 
all its wonderful grace, is the least and lowest, 
and in the strife of which these graves are mute, 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 333 

but most eloquent witnesses, no man will more 
readily testify than the soldier himself who hears 
me, it was the common quality found on both 
sides. This, indeed, was deeply to be desired, if 
such a contest was inevitable as that through 
which we have come. Now that two hundred 
years have gone, and all the old soreness has 
gone with the years, the Englishman is proud of 
the splendid heroism displayed by Puritan and 
Cavalier alike, and would not, for any price, have 
it possible that half the great family, when the 
quarrel came to the solemn arbitration of the 
sword, should turn out poltroons and cowards. 
And while it was essential that the Puritan 
should win in the last battle, — as it always is 
that heaven should win against hell, — the hero- 
ism of those who stood for the wrong is still the 
grand background to the picture of Ironside and 
Roundhead standing for the right. They had to 
come together when the old war was over, and 
band together for the common good. They could 
only do that as they felt that each had sterling 
qualities of heroism which the other was bound 
to respect. So it is with us to-day, and will be 
forever. When the old bitterness has gone out 



334 AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 

of our hearts, and all the wounds are healed, 
and we are one nation, we shall be proud of the 
heroic qualities displayed by so many on the 
other side, and feel that this heroism is the com- 
mon possession of the men of our stock. North 
or South, it makes no difference as to that. Right 
or wrong, that grand quality abides, and, like the 
fallen angels in Milton's mighty epic, such traits 
come . out, even in their struggle with the Lord 
of Hosts, as fill us with a sorrowful respect for 
such natures, while we utterly condemn the sin 
that dragged- them down. 

Now we are coming together. We shall come 
together ; and then when the old gain has gone 
out, it will be better for us all, and for all the 
world, that there should be men like Stonewall 
Jackson on the other side. For Fort Pillow, and 
Lawrence, and Andersonville, and the Libby, and 
all such murder and torture, I feel an unuttera- 
ble loathing. Such things can only be done by 
the very spawn and refuse of the pit. To be 
concerned in them, by implication even, is to be 
blotted out of the book of American life ; but 
heroism, like this that I speak about, knew noth- 
ing of that; and heroism, I say, was a common 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



335 



quality. A fairer light rests this day on the 
graves of these heroes because they fell fighting 
with heroes in battle. And they will one day 
be friends worthy of our friendship, who were 
foes worthy of our steel. Our President has 
done no wiser thing than when, that morning 
lately, his great antagonist came to see him, 
soldier to soldier, face to face, he gave him prece- 
dence of all the vampires that were seeking some 
way by which they might fasten on the body 
politic, and fill their veins from its life. He 
simply gave precedence to his foe, who wanted 
now to be a friend, over those that, in the guise of 
friendship, are to-day the worst foes the country 
has to encounter. 

This, then, is the first truth : we deck the 
graves of heroes, all the more heroic in that they 
had to meet their peers in heroism, and conquer 
them. " Dearly, then, we can treasure all beside 
that brings this noble quality home to our hearts ; 
can watch them leave their homes, while mothers, 
and sisters, and wives gather about them, not 
to hinder, thank God, but to help, — Spartan 
women, with Christian hearts, battling with their 
tears, only giving their prayers free course, and 



\ 

336 AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



their words of deep courage, until the boys were 
out of sight. 

We can think of them in their camps, bracing 
up- their hearts to the strange, new life, with 
that distant look in their eyes I have seen so 
many times, telling me the spirit is not there. 
It has swept over the distance between the tent 
and the homestead, and is looking in, and watch- 
ing the life that must go on in its steady round, 
whether the husband or brother is present or 
absent. 

Then, as the day darkens, we can watch them 
go forth to battle — to that awful work which 
seems at once to touch the direct and divin- 
est possibilities of life ; set themselves sternly, 
shoulder to shoulder, make their breasts a bul- 
wark for their motherland ; to die if they must, 
or be maimed if they must, but to conquer what- 
ever comes : and then if it is to die, to depart, 
as I have seen so many go, as when God kissed 
his servant on the mountain, and he slept. No 
complaint, and no fear ; only the one great assur- 
ance that always comes with the well-done — the 
assurance that all is well here and yonder ; that 
a life is always good for a life j no fear for, the 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



337 



soul that has done its duty ; only the day -dawn 
of an infinite hope. 

It has been my lot to kneel at the death-bed 
of many Christians. I never knelt by one on 
which the light from Heaven shone quite so 
clear as it did on the poor cot of some soldiers 
who could not tell me much about their faith, but 
could tell me all I wanted to know about their 
duty. Dear r tender, beautiful souls, speaking of 
the wife and children with their last breath, and 
of their hope that the country for which they 
died would not forget them, and then leaving all 
the rest to God. No matter about the harp and 
crown ; if that was not best, they were not going 
to lament. So far they were sure of their foot- 
ing, and they did not fear for the next step. To 
die for the great Mother was enough — that they 
felt was, in their poor measure, as when Christ 
died for their race. Heroes ! No better or bright- 
er heroism was ever seen on this planet, than that 
which shone forth from these men, to whose dust 
we bring this beauty, wherever they lie. 

I said, just now, that heroism was the lowest 
of the three grand qualities by which these risen 
souls, that look down on us to-day, are forever to 
22 



338 AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



be distinguished. It may be for the reason that 
it is the quality on which the others must rest, 
and but for which they could have no real ex- 
istence. The hero underlies the patriot and the 
saviour. Patriotism and sacrifice rest on the 
quaking sand, when heroism, the unconquerable 
quality, does not hold them up. " First win the 
battle, then look after me," Colonel Silas Miller 
cried. It was the instinct of the hero. Heroism, 
Carlyle has said, is that divine relation which, in 
all times, relates a great man to other men. It 
unites us to-day to every hero, in the land and 
in the sea, who fell for our country. But for 
their deeds we should have no country; the 
heroes of the Nation, alive and dead, are at the 
foundation of the American nationality. 

II. I said that above the hero stands the pa- 
triot. I speak still of the soldier when I say this, 
because it is the lesson of his life I am touching; 
and he is greater as a patriot than a hero, because 
he rose above all minor things, and gave himself, 
without reservation, to the republic. 

I mean no offence when I say that there is a 
sectional patriotism, just as there is a sectarian 
Christianity. I say it the more freely, because I 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 339 

have to confess that I belong to a section in the 

republic and a sect in the church, and I cannot 

see my way out of my limitations. In ordinary 

times, I have said already, 1 believe this to be 

best. It is the disagreement of the atmospheres 

that cleanses the air. Our stormy lake there is 

infinitely better than the Dead Sea. The only 

perfect repose I know of is the awful stillness of 

the grave. We can never cease contending about 

principles and policies of government; and all 

honest contention, loyal still to the land, is like 

the systole and diastole of a true heart. 

But when the crisis came that was to test the 

« 

heroism of these men, it was to test their patriot- 
ism too. We were in a mighty contention among 
ourselves. We were not clear about our duty ; 
to many a man who fought and fell for us, there 
came a time, in those days, when the reason for 
standing back, and substantially deserting the 
country, must have been as subtle and strong as 
the reasons for deserting Jehovah, in the old war 
in heaven, were to many a still unfallen angel. 
But in that moment, when our sole hope of salva- 
tion, under God, was in the compacted strength 
of every true man, then, as in Switzerland once, 



340 AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 

every canton poured out its people, and from 
every mountain came the mountaineer, to strike 
one stroke, — and the land was saved. So these 
men passed over the lines of difference, to stand 
shoulder to shoulder: forgetting the old battle- 
cries of the party, they gave themselves, without 
reserve, for the land ; and it was this that made 
them greater than heroes. They could be heroes 
on the wrong side ; they could only be patriots 
on the right side. Above all the reasons that 
could be given why they should hold back, and 
let " Mene, Tekel " be written, once for all, across 
our history, rose this one thing that could not be 
reasoned about, — the salvation of the land. It 
was to them as when you shall give a man rea- 
sons for not helping his mother; but then she 
shall say, " My son, I am your mother. I suckled 
you at my breast, and held you on my knees." 
Then that is enough ; there is no reason that can 
meet that instinct ; it lifts the man with a mighty 
spring to stand by her side. 

This was the patriotism of these men. They 
forgot everything but the one great tender tie. 
" Let us agree to have a country," they said, 
" and then we can afford to differ about the best 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



341 



way to take care of it." They counted all things 
as loss save the excellency of the glory of an 
unbroken republic. And so it was natural that 
citizens of Chicago should think very tenderly, 
at such a time as this/ of one who rests alone at 
the other extreme of our city. He was a soldier, 
though he struck no stroke except the stroke of 
his mighty words. He died just as the trumpet 
was sounding for the host, but he died fighting 
with a mighty ardor for the land he loved. I 
cast my poor blossom across the grave of Doug- 
las, who, when the crisis came against which he 
had always striven by the best light he had, knew 
nothing under heaven but the undivided land. 

Out of the graves of our heroes, everywhere, 
blooms this fair flower of patriotism. True men, 
who could rise above all minor things to the 
height of this great argument, that the republic, 
just as it was then, trembling, seemingly on the 
verge of dissolution, was good enough to live and 
die for, so lived and died for the republic ; and 
now they abide in the unfading splendor of hero 
and patriot together, as we abide a moment in 
their shining presence, to adorn their graves. 

III. There is one step higher still these great 



342 AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



souls have taken, — the loftiest men can ever 
attain to in this mortal life : they are not only 
our heroes and patriots, as they stand there above 
us in their shining ranks, but the saviours of their 
country, and of all that was bound up in her un- 
divided destiny ! 

When I try to weigh the whole matter which 
called these men, at last, to their great estate, I 
am forced to the conclusion that there was no 
way left to save this nation but by its most pre- 
cious blood. God sent prophets and teachers, as 
great and good as he ever sent to any nation, 
and they poured out their hearts for us, — and it 
was all in vain. Everything was done which could 
be done, short of this shedding of blood, to avert 
the woe ; but we were helpless to avert it. Only 
the noblest and best we had, leaping into the 
gulf in his best estate, could close the chasm, 
and secure the integrity of the land. Indeed, if 
this were the time and place, it would not be hard 
to tell how the trumpet that sounded the war did 
but announce the end of a truce ; and this strug- 
gle was only a new outbreak of the long fight 
between despotic and democratic institutions, in 
which Gettysburg was made one with Marston- 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



343 



Moor. No such thing can be done to-day. It is 
enough to sa}^ the solemn crisis came in which 
the best we could have, could only be obtained 
at the cost of the best we had. Then these men 
came forward, — young men, with the bloom on 
their lives, strong men, and true, — the best we 
had, and offered themselves, if that would do, as 
the price of the national salvation. Budding 
hopes were in the heart of the youth, of a fair 
home by and by, and a good wife to keep it, and 
gracious presences fresh from God to people it, 
and a career burdened with the blessing that 
comes to every true man in this noble country. 
But he gave it all for the land, and said, " Live 
or die, that shall be my first care." 

Strong ties bound others, — home, wife, chil- 
dren, fortune, a career already open, — everything 
the heart could wish. To give up life at thirty 
was nothing beside giving up these things that 
life had brought. " My ten great reasons for tak- 
ing no risk," one said, 11 were a wife and nine 
children." 

I have no standard by which to measure what 
the men who left these things, and rest in these 
graves, have done. It seems like trying to measure 



344 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



the infinite. The infinite is in it. But there they 
stood in that great clay, — the youth in the portals 
of his life, the man at his fireside, — and they looked 
right into the heart of all that was about them, 
and before them, and above them ; and then they 
said, " I can give it all if my country needs it." 
Then they went out and gave it all for the need. 
They kept nothing back ; like brave Captain 
Thompson, they said, " I leave all with God ; " 
like Colonel Wright, when one arm was gone, 
they could "thank God that one hand might guide 
a horse ; " like Major Chandler, they said, " Where 
I can be of most service I will stay; " like Silas 
Miller, they shouted, as their life leaped out, 
" First win the battle, then look after me ; " like 
Mulligan, they cried, " I am dying, boys ; but 
don't lose the colors.; " and like Ransom, they 
said, " I have tried to do my duty, and have no 
fear for myself after death." 

Do- I mention these men, whose words still 
sound in our ears, it is only to realize for you the 
truth about all these noble dead. Not one soldier, 
I care not how obscure, giving his life in this 
fashion, falls short of this great place — not one 
such man has died in vain. It is a whole sacri- 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



345 



fice, and they are all saviours. They stand above 
us this day, as we stand by their graves, risen 
and glorified. I question the value of no other 
sacrifice ; but this, to me, is the greatest — the 
price that was paid for our nationality in the true 
gold of their true life. Nothing can rise above that, 
except that help of God, without which all were 
vain. Glorious forever, with the hero and pa- 
triot, stands the saviour. All that a man has he 
will give for his life. Yet these gave their life, 
asking for nothing again, but that their land and 
nation might not be torn asunder. 

I have been led to make this threefold distinc- 
tion in the glory of our dead, because I have felt 
it would not only give us a clearer conception of 
the true nature of what they have done, but 
might come home the more weightily to those of 
us who stand here to-day. Heroism, patriotism, 
and the great office of the saviour, are the threefold 
cord that must still bind every true American to 
his duty, and open the way to his greatest place. 
We must be heroes still, and patriots, and saviours, 
or we must stand in the shadow, while these men 
stand in the light, and be content to be despised 
when they are worshipped. God gives no man 



346 AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



a supreme place who will not do a supreme work. 
War and peace are but the two ways that he has 
marked out for the one thing. Heroism as high, 
patriotism as precious, and a saviourship as sacred 
as that which these men rose to, are still open to 
you and me. Pre-emption from any one of these 
. glorious qualities is pre-emption from the best 
that God has to give. To be hero, patriot, and 
saviour is the mark of the prize of our high call- 
ing. To fight against corruption, as these fought 
against conspiracy ; to stand for the whole land, 
in peace, as they did in war ; and in war, if it 
come again, to make the uttermost sacrifice 
which can be demanded for the commonwealth 
of America, — these are just as truly the demand 
made on you and me as was the demand on the 
men whose dust moulders beneath these mounds. 
The body and blood of this sacrament of flowers 
for the heroes and patriots and saviours of our 
land, are lost to our life, if they fail to make us 
heroes, patriots, and saviours also. 

I must not weary you. I have but a few more 
words that insist on being said. Brave men, I 
have said ; good soldiers, — and you gather from 
this the idea that I have meant men, and not wo- 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



347 



men, — but I could never hope to pardon myself, 
let alone be pardoned of God and my country, if 
I failed to speak at such a time of the woman, too, 
and of the woman, in every respect, as the exem- 
plar of the great qualities I have pointed out in 
the man. The woman stood as truly as the man 
by this great cause ; made her sacrifice as quietly 
and as perfectly as he did, and on the battle-field, 
or in the hospital, or the house, was the hero, the 
patriot, and the saviour, too. 

When the youth would look into the eyes of 
the maiden for confirmation of his longing to let 
his love of the land take precedence of his love 
for her, she said Amen, gave him the kiss of con- 
secration, and sent him forth, her true knight. 
When the husband said, with a shaking voice, to 
the wife, " I feel almost as if I ought to go, and 
leave you and the children," the voice of the wife 
grew steady as she said, " Go, then ; " turning al- 
most into altogether, in the sacrifice ; and she 
looked on with steady eyes, at least until he was 
gone, because all the courage there was, or could 
be, must be taken with him to the camp. Then, 
as the work went on, and grew ever more dread- 
ful, and new drafts were made on her life for help 



348 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



to the sick and wounded, and for everything that 
a woman can do to cube the might of man, with 
unflinching steadiness she toiled and suffered; 
supplying, with a measureless generosity, every- 
thing that was needed to the call ; sanctifying 
this very day, this Sunday of ours, 0, so many 
times, by doing all manner of work, and doing 
everything, not merely without a murmur, — for 
that we might have expected of her patience and 
her love, — but doing it with -a mighty cheerful- 
ness, that sent cheer into every hero's soul, and 
was the expression, through all the darkness, of 
the light she foresaw and foretold, — singing of 
the coming of victory and peace, when the full 
price was paid, and the powers of darkness were 
driven away by the power of the living God. 

Under thousands of mounds, in the circle of 
our land this day, rest these true women, heroes, 
patriots, and saviours, with the men. Broken 
down at their tasks, when the poor frame could 
hold the great soul no longer, they died, as they 
had lived, for the motherland; not having re- 
ceived the promise, but seeing it afar off, and 
with their last breath praying for the establish- 
ment of the right. Over all these graves we 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



349 



cast our blossoms, as we cast them on the graves 
of our noble men. These flowers, and that which 
these flowers symbolize everywhere, we cast on 
the graves in which all women are resting, whose 
souls are risen to that great place, and stand with 
the angels of God. 

Neither can I forget, as I stand here, that com- 
pany of unknown martyrs who never found their 
way where they could fight for the right, yet 
could not countenance the wrong, and so were 
slain, and buried beneath the ruins of their own 
homesteads, and lie there to-day under the South- 
ern sun. Poor, dumb, nameless martyrs — men 
and women who could only suffer, but had no 
chance to do, or could only do in nooks and cor- 
ners, carrying their lives in their hands ; and 
then, at last, giving them for the land that was 
never to know their name. Not one such grave 
of man or woman, white or black, can be*left out 
of this consecration. They did what they could ; 
we give for it what we have. They need noth- 
ing we can do ; we need to feed our hearts on 
their great lesson of how good it is to be stead- 
fast and true, all to yourself, if the host is on the 
other side, and to die one lone man or woman for 



350 AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



the right, where the wrong seems supreme. My 
heart goes out, as I stand here this day, to those 
nameless graves of the nameless martyrs. I bid 
you remember them as you offer your gift. * They, 
too, are our kinsmen and friends: they died that 
we might live. 

Finally, I bid you look with a tender pity on 
the graves of those who died fighting against us, 
if they knew no better. They know better now, 
and if they could come back into life, would be 
with us and of us. It was the fate of many, 
more than their fault, to be drawn into that 
dreadful vortex, to fight against the holiest 
things, and think they were doing God service. 
It is their doom to have fallen fighting for the 
wrong. Let us cast the mantle of forgiveness 
over their graves, and let some poor blossom 
overflow that way as a token of what we feel. 
We alone can afford to forgive and forget. We 
cannot afford to wait until those forgive and for- 
get who are at our mercy. 0, strong, and true, 
and tender is the North ! and this is the time for 
tenderness. 

And then, as these great thanksgivings well up 
in our souls, and we say, God bless the land that 



AT THE SOLDIERS' GRAVES. 



351 



has been saved by this sacrifice ! let us do what 
these great ones are beseeching us to do from 
their high place — thank God for making them 
what they are. Then, as the starshine pales be- 
fore the sunshine, the light of the glory of God 
will flood these cemeteries, set shining ones be- 
side all the graves, and send us home with a sense 
that we have seen only the grave-clothes. All 
our dead are risen ! Death is swallowed up in 
Victory ! 



ROBERT COLLYER'S WORKS. 



Is 

NATURE AND LIFE. 

TENTH EDITION. 

Price $1.50. Fine edition, bevelled boards, gilt edges, with facsimile 
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OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

The broad humanity of the writer, his ready sympathy, his recog- 
nition of the superiority of true religion over all its forms, and last, but 
not least, the poetic quality of his thought, bespeak for him a hearing 
with all earnest men. As much as Mr. Beecher, he belongs to all the 
sects. — The Nation, New York. 

Their peculiar charm is to be found in the freshness and glow of their 
sympathy with all human conditions. — Independent, New York. 

Every page is bright with good cheer, and presents considerations 
that are calculated to strengthen the best motives, lead to the noblest liv- 
ing, and inspire the heart with child-like trust in the Infinite Father. — 
The Liberal Christian. 

The result of Mr, Collycr-s self-education, and consequent original 
style of thought, is manifest in these sermons. Healthiness is the term 
which may most properly be applied to them. There are no signs of 
dyspepsia or bronchitis in them. You may be sure his lungs are 
sound, his chest broad, his arm strong, his head clear. They fairly 
glow with the ruddiness of fresh, out-door health. Their tone is always 
manly and sincere, and expression clear, concise, and convincing. — 
Chicago Tribxme. 

No thoughtful man or woman can read these sermons without gain- 
ing good thereby, — without having the heart set aflame by the love of 
God, and nature, and man, which is revealed in musical simplicity in 
every line thereof. — Republican, Chicago. 

The themes are drawn from the evcry-day experience of lifa; from 
the hopes, the sorrows, the perplexities, the aspirations of the human 
heart, and ar-e treated with a wisdom, a gentleness, a pathos, a rich, 
loving sympathy, which raise them above the usual sphere of eloquence 
into that of persuasive and touching counsel. — New York Tribune. 

All of them are aglow with a sweet, fresh, spiritual life, that sheds a 
radiance of hope, aiid faith, and love on the darkest theme. Some of 
them are more than sermons, — they are poems, rich in thought and 
beautiful in expression. — Portland Transcript. 

Happy the man to whom these sermons — these poems, rather, for 
such in very truth they are— come in his hour of need. They will 
help him over many of the rough places of his life; and when we put 
them on our shelves, it shall not be side by side with other sermons, 
but Longfellow and Tennyson shall keep them company on either 
hand. — Christian Examiner. 

Sermons though these are, they set every page ablaze, and make the 
book as entertaining to a reader of taste and wholesome moral sym- 
pathies as a romance of Scott or a drama of Shakespeare. — Freewill 
Baptist Quarterly. 



Robert Collyer's Works. 



II. 

A MAN IN E ARNEST : 

DLIFE OF A. II. COXOT. 

Price $1.25. 

Fine edition, with Portrait of Mr. Conant, price $2.00. 

To such as would have the most attractive bit of biography of the 
day, we commend " A Man in Earnest," with the assurance that their 
estimate of the value of life will be enlarged, strengthened, and purified 
thereby; and, if they do not rise with the belief that Mr. Conant was 
the wisest of men, they will be sure that Eobert Col Iyer is the most 
charming and appreciative of biographers. — Evening Post, Chicago. 

Those who have read his " Nature and Life," as well as those who 
have heard him speak, will read the book, not so much to learn the 
story of Mr. Conant's life, as to come in contact once more with the 
fresh, earnest eloquence, the noble, genial, inspiring sentiments, the 
large heart of Mr. Collyer. It is the prerogative of genius to glorify 
with sons:, or eloquence, or wondrous touch whatever subject it treats; 
and so this gentle though brave and manly life of a pioneer preacher is 
set before us a genre picture, made glorious and beautiful and powerful 
by the strong and radiant touches of a master hand. To know the 
writer is to be magnetized and charmed by him ; to read this little book 
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III. 

THE LIFE THAT NOW IS. 

With an excellent Steel Portrait of the Author, engraved by Perine. 
Price, $1.50. 

Fine edition, bevelled boards, gilt edges, price $2.00. 

A new volume, by Robert Collyer, of Chicago, is announced by 
Horace B. Fuller, of Boston. That it will be a treasury of wisdom 
and wit, of the most delicate insight, the most humane sympathy, the 
most poetic imagination, all who have heard the eloquent preacher, or 
read his delightful "Nature and Life," will be sure. — Gkorgk 
Wilt.iam Curtis, in Harper's Weekly. 

Mr. Fuller expects to publish a second series of sermons by Eobert 
Collyer. " Nature and Life" has sold towards ten thousand copies; 
the forthcoming book will doubtless have a still larger sale, for the 
enviable fame of Mr. Collyer has grown very fast of late years, .and 
there are hundreds of thousands now of the most intelligent persons 
between the Atlantic and the Pocky Mountains who prize his golden 
words, and yet more the vast heart that he puts into all he says. He 
breathes on dead phrases, and they become living souls. — Boston 
Correspondence of Cincinnati Chronicle. 

Rev. Robert Collyer, who is another instance of a rare poetic 
genius appearing in an English workingman, who is indeed one of the 
rarest prose poets the English race has produced, will soon issue 
another book. His theology is unsound, doubtless ; but his poetry and 
his human sympathy are unsurpassed. — New York Independent. 

HORACE E. FULLER, Publisher, 



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THEODORE PARKER'S WRITINGS. 

NEW EDITION. 



A DISCOURSE OF MATTERS PERTAINING TO RELI- 
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I. Of Religion in General ; or, The Religious Element and its M inifestations. 

II. Relation of the Religious Element to God ; or, A Discourse of Inspiration. 

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IV. Relation of the Religious Element to the Greatest of Books; or, A Discourse 
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IV. The Popular Theology of Christendom regarded as a Principle of Ethics. 

V. Speculative Theism regarded as a Theory of th? Universe. 

VI. Practical Theism regarded as a Principle of Ethics. 

VII. The Function and influence ot the Idea of Immortal Life 

VIII. The Universal Providence of God. 

IX. , X. The Economy of Pain and Misery under the Universal Providence of God. 



TEN SERMONS OF RELIGION. I vol. l2mo, cloth. $1.50. 

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III. Justice and the Conscience. 

I V. Love and the Affections. 

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II. The Boston Kidnapping, — the Rendition of Thomas Sims. 
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IV. Discomsc occasioned by the Death of Daniel Webster. 

V. The Nebraska Question! 

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II. The New Crime against Humanitv, — the Rendition of Anthony Burns. 
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IV. The Dangers which threaten the Rights of Man in America. 

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V. A Sermon of the Mexican War. 

VI. A Sermon ( f the Perishing Classes in Boston. 

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II. A Speech atthe New-England Anti-Slavery Convention in Boston, May 29,1850. 
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IV. The Function and Place of . Conscience in Relation to the Laws of Men: a 
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VII. The Three Chief Safeguards of Society, considered in a Sermon at the Melo- 
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VIII. The Position and Duties of the American Scholar. 



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IX. How to m >ve the NA'orld. 

X. Primitive Christianity. 
XL Strauss's Life of Jesus. 
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